


Ripples

by foxsgloves



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Alternate Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Conquest Route, F/F, Just gals being pals, and SMOOCHIN', and bonding over swimming lessons, and ghost stories, and wartime doubts, some canon divergence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-05-22 06:17:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6068287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxsgloves/pseuds/foxsgloves
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Corrin and Azura’s lives were intertwined before they ever met.  For Corrin, loving her reflection is as natural and inevitable as the flow of water.  Conquest route F!Corrin/Azura romance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Lady of the Lake

**Author's Note:**

> It is a great injustice that one cannot romance Azura w/ F!Corrin and I came here to rectify that

It is Corrin’s third day in the capital and the second day she walks down to the lakeshore, and this time she finds it still and silent, the water ruffled by a lazy breeze. She dangles her feet over the edge of the little pier to wash the rusty eastern dust from her feet. The earth is different here, red and loamy and fertile, crumbling between her toes and coating her bare feet. The air is different, too, sticky against her skin, thick and warm as bathwater. With every breath she feels a bit like she is slowly drowning.

But she’s out under the sky. That’s new. And welcome, even when the sunlight prickles the back of her neck and draws beads of sweat to dribble down the small of her back. She shuts her eyes and tilts her head back, the inside of her eyelids painted brilliant red by the sunlight.

The slap and slosh of water against rocky shore muffles the sound of footsteps until they’ve drawn far too close. She straightens with a start, a hand flying to shade her eyes as she peers up at the newcomer.

“Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there,” says Azura. She’s draped in a loose robe, her feet bare, her mass of blue hair bound back against her neck. “I did not mean to disturb you. Corrin.”

“Of course not. If anything, I’m the one bothering you. This is your place.” Corrin hoists her dripping feet back over the edge of the pier. “By all means, please sing, if you like. I just… came out here to think a little bit.”

This is a lie. Corrin did not come to lake to think. She’d drunk her fill of her own confused thoughts up in the strange castle, in her strange room, hung with strange drawings done by another, forgotten child’s hand. She came to the lake in the hopes of catching a snatch of Azura’s song, the song that had first lured her to the shore.

And now her plots have come to fruition, but Azura does not look too like to sing. It seems the strange and fleeting confidence that had taken hold of her upon their first meeting has all but drained away, leaving her plucking at the hem of one of her sleeves, her gaze resting on Corrin’s pruny toes.

“Or, uh… I can go. If you’d rather be alone.” Corrin’s pointed ears flush with heat.

Azura blinks, her eyes meeting Corrin’s. “No. Stay, please. I was just about to go for a swim.” She throws a glance over her shoulder at the path towards town, perhaps checking for approaching strangers, perhaps considering bolting for the hills and leaving Corrin to her sweat and solitude. “You’re welcome to join me, if you like.”

Swimming lessons had not been considered a necessary part of Corrin’s education. “Maybe later,” she says, dipping a toe back in.

Azura lifts one shoulder in a small shrug and shucks off her robe, letting it pool on the pier beneath her as she adjusts her swimming dress. Her blue pendant is still strung around her neck. “All right,” she says. “If you’re sure you don’t mind.”

Corrin watches from the corner of her eye as Azura takes a running dive off the edge, neatly breaking the glassy surface with only a handful of ripples. As Azura strokes back and forth across the lake in tight circles, an occasional brief flash of pale shoulder or white ankle breaking the surface, Corrin searches the lines of her face for any kind of resemblance to the family she was born to.

With her round golden eyes and small mouth and narrow chin, she hardly favors them more than Corrin, which is not very much at all. Corrin knows this very well, as she spent many a day as a girl peering so closely at her mirror her nose left smudges, working herself into a misery wondering whether she would be allowed to go live in the capital with everyone else had she been born with violet eyes or a strong jaw like the rest of her family.

Well, now she has her answer to that.

Azura flips over and dives deep, and just when Corrin is starting to scan the surface in worry she resurfaces next to Corrin’s dangling feet. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in? Your cheeks are getting red.” She considers, bracing one foot in the shallow lakebed to sway back and forth like a reed in an eddy. “Or do you not know how?”

“I can’t,” Corrin blurts, her cheeks burning ruddier under what is surely the beginnings of a sunburn. 

“Oh. Is it because you never learned? Or because you don’t like it?”

“No one ever taught me.” Xander, Corrin’s customary instructor in such things, had never learned himself. Azura reminds her of nothing so much as Xander as a youth, back when he stammered and wrung his hands and refused to look anyone in the eye. 

“Well. It’s far too hot today. Surely that’s reason enough. I could teach you.” Azura grips the edge of the pier and hauls herself upwards. “If you wanted to.”

“That sounds like a lovely idea right about now.” Corrin hoists up her skirt and tucks it in at the waist, then peels her hair away from her sweat-damp neck, fumbling with the ends attempting to draw it into a braid. Unfortunately, this is yet another skill she never acquired.

Azura giggles. “Here, I’ll help you.” She kneels at Corrin’s side and binds a braid, humming as she works, a fast and lilting tune to match her sure movements. Corrin shivers when Azura’s chilled and damp fingers brush against her neck and shoulders. 

“There. Done. I used to practice on Takumi, you know,” she says with a grin as she slides back into the water.

Corrin lets out a laugh, which quickly rises into a shriek as she enters the water with an ungainly splash. “It’s cold!” she cries.

Azura covers her mouth with her hand when she laughs, quick and surprised, like a bird taking flight from a shaken branch. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you.” She does not appear to be all that sorry.

They stand in the shallows so Azura can demonstrate the basics of the puppy paddle. “You know,” says Corrin as she flails her arms back and forth, by some miracle managing to keep her head afloat, “this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to go swimming, you know.” She wants to startle that laugh from Azura again. “I tried once on my own. It was summer at home—I mean, at the Northern Fortress, and it was very hot, for Nohr.” 

The summer when Corrin turned eight years old, bizarrely hot and bizarrely dry. She begged Flora to use her ice magic. She squatted next to the cold chest in the kitchens until Jakob chased her away to the inferior shade beneath the old, twisted trees in the courtyard. Feverish with heat and boredom, she prayed fervently for a visitor. Any visitor would do. Even Camilla’s odious cousins, whom Camilla was honor-bound to drag along on some of her visits. 

Even her father.

“I was getting very bored, you see, with no one to see and nothing to do. And in the center of the courtyard there was this huge, absolutely hideous fountain, with a barely recognizable statue of Father—I mean, a statue of King Garon in the center, with water coming out of his sword. It was hardly deep enough to drown in and the water looked so cool and inviting.” She attempts to imitate Azura’s forward-crawl stroke, with mixed results. “So, of course, I stripped right down to my smallclothes and hopped in.”

“You didn’t!” said Azura, with that splash of laughter Corrin had been hoping for.

“Oh, I did. And was promptly joined by my butler, still fully clothed, may I add, while he chased me around and around the edge. Finally he was forced to run off for aid, and it took the combined efforts of nearly all my retainers to yank me out. And then they drained the fountain for the rest of the summer to conserve water, and that was that.”

Azura is still giggling as she flips a stray strand of soggy hair out of her eyes. “The Northern Fortress. So you did not live in the capital, then?” There is a bitter edge to the way Azura speaks of it, of the city she must remember something of a childhood in.

“No. I wasn’t allowed to visit the capital at all until just a week hence. Or anywhere else, really.” Corrin flips over to float facing upwards, arching the small of her back as Azura demonstrates. “I spent all of my days in the Northern Fortress.”

“I’m sorry.” Azura studies her blurred reflection in the surface. “It was thoughtless of me to ask. You must have been very lonely.”

“No!” Corrin rights herself with a wobble. “Don’t be sorry. I was a little lonely, but it wasn’t so terrible. My siblings—that is, my adopted siblings, I suppose—came to visit as often as they could. Especially Elise. It even got a little tiresome.” Elise was tireless, and always had a new game to play, and always twisted the rules so she could win. “I even had a little book club with Jakob and Felicia. There was a marvelous library, and we never ran out of things to read.”

“I see. Jakob… and Felicia? They were your servants?”

“Yes, and my friends. Jakob was my butler, he of the daring fountain rescue. And Felicia was a very good cook.” And thank the sweet dragon she had never found the abysmal poems Corrin had authored to her soft strawberry hair and long, work-roughened fingers. “I had the most embarrassing crush on her when I was small,” she admits, glancing sideways at Azura.

Azura, smiling, draws closer and pitches her voice low. “Would you like to know a secret? When I first came here as a girl, I fancied myself in love with Hinoka.”

“That’s quite understandable,” says Corrin. She could very well imagine Azura admiring Hinoka, younger but still as lithe and firm with a weapon in her hands, still as sure and gentle off the practice yard. 

“Though of course nothing came of it, and now we are like sisters in true.”

“So… have they been good to you?” She finds it difficult to imagine there was ever a time when Takumi, for one, would have let her play with his hair, not hearing the cold and curt way he speaks of her now. 

“Oh, of course. Far better than I ever expected or deserved.” And though her voice does not waver, her mouth pulls downward, and before Corrin can ask what she thinks she deserves, she hauls herself over the edge of the pier once more. “Show me your forward crawl one more time.”

Corrin obeys, stroking up and down the shallows, and Azura declares it a strong first effort for a beginner. “We’ll make a fish out of you yet, Corrin,” she says as they sit unwinding their tangled braids. 

Corrin wrinkles her nose. “It’s rude to compare a lady to a fish, you know.”

“A noble dolphin, then. Or a water dragon.”

“I like the sound of that.” The heat that had been so oppressive now fills her chilled bones, loosens her cold-stiff joints. Azura tugs her robe back on over her shoulders and Corrin knots her heavy skirt to wring it dry. 

“You know, Shirasagi has a marvelous library of its own,” Azura says. “Let’s go together. If you would like.” Corrin shakes out the hem of her tunic, dripping all over the pier. “After we find you a change of clothes.” After a moment of hesitation she offers her hand.

“Yes. I’d like that,” says Corrin, and takes it, and follows her back up the path to where the pale castle gleams. She’d had knots in her stomach at the thought of returning, but she finds that walking side by side with Azura her dread has all drained away, lost and sunk to the depths of the lake.

Now she dwells on her new awareness of her pulse fluttering in her ears and her damp hair stirring against her shoulders. Azura hums as they walk, soft and slow, like an old hymn. After a few bars Corrin joins in, and though her voice is creaky and off-key, Azura’s only grows stronger until it rises to fill the empty wood.


	2. At the Riverside

“Where are you off to, Corrin?”

Corrin freezes mid-step with her toes just on the threshold of camp. And she’d thought herself so subtle, so silent—Sakura had barely stirred in her sleep when she rolled out of her blankets, and was sleeping soundly once more when she gently dropped the front flap of their tent.

And yet, here is Azura, a lantern in one hand and a small grin on her face, her hair tangled about her head like a ragged halo.

“I was… um.” Whenever she tries to dig up a good lie Corrin’s mind goes empty as a drained sieve. “I was… just going for a little moonlight stroll.” There, that was plausible. She’d come a long way since her dismal attempts of trying to persuade Gunther that, yes, truly, she had been kidnapped by a stealthy troop of elite Chevois knights she had just barely and heroically escaped, and was most definitely not trying to sneak out.

“I see. In full armor, too.” Azura is clad in a Hoshidan nightgown, pearl-grey linen and tied at the waist. The edge of a long scar peeks out of the open neck just along her collarbone. And few inches above, striping her throat, a trio of old bruises faded to sickly yellow.

“Well, we’re at war, and the wilds are dangerous,” Corrin stutters. “It never hurts to be prepared.”

“Of course. And they seem to be especially dangerous lately, what with all those strange claw markings springing up during the night whenever we stop to make camp.”

Corrin pinches her lips together and sighs through her nose. Her dragonstone shifts and settles on her breast beneath layers of cloth and armor. It always gave off an odd but content warmth like a little tucked-away hearth, but tonight against her bare skin it is almost uncomfortably hot. “And here I thought I was being so sneaky. Just like a ninja.”

She’d had to tell the ninja, obviously. She did not want a dawn confrontation with Kaze and his stoic brother about why there were huge claw tracks in the mud a mile from camp. And Takumi’s people, the pair of energetic, smiling youths who seemed to take every guard shift and held out their arms to stop her from leaving alone.

And she’d had to tell Hinoka, because Hinoka crept about after her like a second shadow—unconsciously, it seemed, for once Corrin pointed it out her sister glowed red and spluttered a denial and then made all appearances to pull back a bit.

And then Ryoma, who would hear from Saizo anyway, and merely crossed his arms and gave her a stately nod, which she returned in kind. This seems to be the basis of her budding relationship with her eldest birth-brother—a whole lot of respectful nodding back and forth.

So she’d had to tell most everyone, really. Except Azura, who pitched her little tent thirty paces away from everyone else’s. All the better to catch onto dragons sneaking out, apparently.

“I’d like to walk with you, if I may.”

Corrin averts her eyes from Azura’s throat. “All right. Okay. But you turn back when it’s time for me to transform, all right? Nobody in a fifty-pace radius. That’s my new rule.”

“Very well,” Azura says, and falls into step beside Corrin as she makes her way through the shadow-clotted underbrush. Corrin is grateful for the light Azura thought to bring. With her odd slitted pupils she can see better in the dark than most, but not what anyone could call well, and skulking about in the night still lent itself to stubbed toes and scraped palms.

They stalk towards the river until the lantern light gleams off the surface, and Corrin says, “Here’s as good a spot as any.” In her trials, however brief, it seems it is easier for her to transform around water, be it river or lake or even city fountain.

With a blustery little sigh, Azura folds herself in the knotted roots of a nearby weeping-tree. “You ought to head off now,” says Corrin helpfully. Rather than making any such move to return to camp, Azura instead bends forward in a stretch that grabs the balls of her feet with a dancer’s enviable suppleness. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I suppose,” Corrin adds. “Sleep well.”

“I shan’t,” Azura says so softly Corrin must strain to hear, “knowing you’re out here going about this alone.” She drags a hand through her hair, fingers snagging on a knot, and adds, “When I gave you the stone you said you said you had no intention of using it.”

Corrin had said just that, the bitter taste of bile and guilt on her tongue as she clutched it so tightly she thought she might shatter it with her frail human fingers.

“Alone is best,” says Corrin firmly. Alone means no more bruises on anyone’s neck.

“So what changed your mind?”

With a sigh and a glance towards the horizon to Nohr—or where it perhaps might be had she not gotten turned about in the gloom—she collapses beside Azura in the tangle of roots. “I read Saizo’s reports of the Norian force. They’re going to be there. At the border.” With a fingertip she ticks off the fingers of her opposite hand. “Xander, Camilla, Leo, Elise.” Even Elise, heaven help her, who had never so much as glanced at a bare sword for longer than ten seconds. Corrin knew because she had once been asked to train her, and without fail it always devolved into poetry and daisy chains.

“And, well… the last time any of my family was endangered… well.” She flicks a limp hand. “You know.”

Azura brushes a fingertip against her bare throat. “Well. If my stone is doing its work, it should keep you from losing control like… like that first time. Maybe you should test it with me here.”

Corrin wags a finger. “That is an awful idea.”

“But how do you know what might happen on the field, at a time of great stress, with people around, if you haven’t practiced with people?”

Corrin pauses with her finger in the air. “As I said, that is… altogether too reasonable an argument.” She pouts at Azura’s small smile of triumph. “Don’t look so satisfied. We need to take safety measures.”

“If the stone is doing its work—“

“Safety measures,” Corrin repeats. “You ought to stay here, near the tree line. If I… if I start rampaging or somesuch… I’m too big to weave around through the trees.” She digs for the pocket Sakura stitched to the inside of her cape and presses a small packet into Azura’s hand. “And this is an emergency flare Saizo gave me. Set it off and make for camp if need be.”

“Corrin, I hardly think—“

Corrin squeezes Azura’s fingers so they close over the small packet. “Emergency flare for emergency use.”

“Very well. What else do you have in those pockets of yours? Did you bring any snacks?”

“No. Why would I—“

“Well, it’s good that I thought to, then.” She slips a small drawstring sack from the inside of her robe and shrugs a shoulder at Corrin’s raised brows. “I get faint when I don’t eat. Want an almond?”

“Yes,” Corrin admits, and tosses back a handful of nuts with a hard gulp. “Well, here goes nothing. I’ll change by the riverbank. And one more thing—before I change back, I’ll shake my tail thrice.” It seems only fair to give Azura due warning. “Changing back… it, um, can take a while. You’ll see.”

“As you wish, Your Highness,” says Azura with a little salute. She settles back into her nest while Corrin strides to the riverside.

Corrin can’t do it while facing Azura—she’s never done this in front of someone else, not on purpose, anyway, and the initial jitters of transformation become tingles of nerves under Azura’s curious scrutiny. So she turns her back, facing the glowing river. It hums a low and comforting sigh.

And she changes. She has tried on a few occasions to explain the process to her curious friends and siblings. She might, in fact, understand it even less the more she tries it out.

“It feels a little like shedding my skin. Like my back splits open, then my arms,” she said to Hinoka. “Only it doesn’t hurt,” she was quick to assure when she saw Hinoka’s queasy expression.

She said to Sakura, “It feels sort of like being shocked—have you ever been hit by a thunder-spell?” Corrin had, one unfortunate afternoon when she’d wandered too close to Leo during an afternoon practice session back when his aim had been less than dependable. “Like that… only not in a bad way,” she blurted when Sakura offered her wide-eyed consolations.

As she promised, it is strange but painless, and there’s a few precious seconds where her sight blackens—and then she is a dragon. The river’s soft hum swells to a full song with harmony and counter-melody. The light of the lantern is now the glow of a little sun, the distant gleam of the pinpricks of stars above the canopy more than good enough to illuminate the entire clearing.

She shakes out her back, reveling in the rasp of her own scales against one another, and resists the urge to run and roar and shake. The problem isn’t that she doesn’t like transforming. She thinks she likes transforming a bit too much altogether.

Instead she runs some awkward, hesitant laps back and forth through the clearing, pacing her new and strange limbs. Azura leans forward to watch, and Corrin can see her perfectly, her eyes and hair gleaming amber in the lantern-light and Corrin’s sharp new sight.

With such little encouragement, Corrin grows confident enough to move faster, spinning through her turns so she appears to chase her own tail. Azura giggles, and to her new ears it tinkles like chimes. Hoping to lure that laugh once more, she goes for a dip in the river and bursts forth to shake herself and scatter droplets everywhere, only to find Azura breaking the rules by taking a few tentative steps across the green.  Corrin stills, and Azura breaks into longer, more confident strides, until she is close enough for Corrin to stretch out her long neck and touch her.

“See?” She raises her palms. “I told you everything would be fine.” And her voice rings like the bells in a chapel tower.

Corrin does stretch her neck out, just a bit, far enough that Azura can stroke a shy hand down the length of her wet-slick scales. “You feel so funny! Like a fish.”

Corrin snorts, huge and inelegant, and Azura reaches up a gentle hand to trace the outline of a wide horn, then leans close to peer at the tracings in her wings. Corrin flutters them for effect. Useless things, the pair of them—what’s the point of wings if one cannot fly?—but they are something to look at, at least, thin and fine as beaten rice paper.

They are also apparently ticklish. She gives a twitch and a grunt of dragon laughter as Azura brushes against one, and then shudders away with a start, bending her neck low to the ground. Azura is frozen with her hand still held in the air, but she does not look afraid. Corrin does not know why. Corrin would be surely afraid of herself if roles were reversed.

“It’s all right,” says Azura, though she brushes a hand to her bruises once again. But she smiles as she says, “I didn’t expect you to be ticklish.”

Corrin shakes her tail three times. Better to end the experiment early before anything else unexpected shows itself. Not that she has any inkling of what, exactly, to expect. Despite her best efforts in the castle library, she failed to track down any handy manuals on dragon transformation.

With a nod, Azura retreats back into the canopy of the wood, and she begins the work of changing back.

It is longer and lacks the mercy of a brief faint. She braces her claws into the soft earth of the riverbank and then she is a human again, on trembling hands and knees with dirty fingers clenched in the soil. Human again, but still not entirely whole, as if now that she’s been wrapped up in her skin again it is too raw and too small, and it stings all over, and her breathing comes slow and her dull sight and duller hearing are nearly blotted out altogether.

The first thing she strains to hear is Azura’s familiar hum, and she gasps in a huge rush and the tingling is gone and she can spread her fingers without difficulty and rise without aches. Azura comes to greet her with one hand grasping the lantern and the other wrapped about her pendant, its glow fading.

Corrin drags in a few more deep breaths. “Did you… did you make it easier somehow?  With your song? That was so much better than my last try.”

“Perhaps I did. Perhaps it is simply growing easier for you with practice.”

“Maybe both,” Corrin muses, brushing soil from the hem of her cape and pulling her dragonstone from its place under her shirt. “I have to say, I do appreciate how this thing takes care of my clothes for me. It wouldn’t do to have to strip naked every time I wished to practice.”

“It certainly would not!” said Azura, but with none of the blush or shock Corrin might expect of a noblewoman. If anything she is biting back a wicked grin.

“Now we’ve got matching necklaces,” Corrin says, gesturing to Azura’s pendant, still clasped under her fingers.

Her hand closes over it. “Yes. Of a sort.”

Corrin takes the lantern from her. “We should head back. You need your sleep.” Perhaps it was the dim lantern glow that made the shadows rimming Azura’s eyes and the exhausted droop of her chin more pronounced. But it was very late.

“And so do you. Maybe now you can rest easier, knowing your penchant for scales won’t make a hard day even harder.”

Corrin purses her mouth. “If only it could actually be helpful. Perhaps I could transform in front of everyone and they’ll just be so impressed they’ll forget about everything else and sit down to dinner together.”

“If any day our families sit down together, I will write a song for the occasion.”

“And Azura? Thank you. For… coming to help me.”

“I wasn’t of much help,” Azura says, shaking the last of her almonds into a hand. Corrin steals one before they all vanish.

“But you were, though. Just listening, and watching.”

“Of course, Corrin. We’re…. friends, aren’t we?”

Friends. “Yes,” Corrin replies, even though the word quivers down her spine with the frission of a lie. She does not know what they are yet, exactly, but she knows that it is not the way of friendship to wish her friend might brush a hand down her neck again, preferably while she wears bare skin instead of scales, or wonder idly about pressing her mouth to the long scar beneath her friend’s collarbone.

They are not friends. What they will be remains to be seen.

* * *

 

The high wind on the hilltop makes the long grasses ripple and flow like the ocean Corrin has never seen.

From their vantage point they can see the retreating Hoshidan forces, blown like scraps of dandelion. Corrin spies the broad, gleaming wings of Hinoka’s sky horse, the one that had eaten apples from her hand at Hinoka’s urge.

Hinoka had been the worst. Sakura’s tears, Takumi’s rage, Ryoma’s disbelief—these things she had steeled herself for. But Hinoka’s long years of guilt, twisted so quickly to bitterness, she could never have prepared for.

Sakura is probably still clinging to her eldest sister, scrubbing at her wet cheeks with her overshirt. And there was Takumi’s hair bobbing—he was still looking over his shoulder, she was sure, even at this distance, poised to put an arrow through her right eye. Ryoma was no longer visible, at the very front of the retreat, leading and shepherding.

A familiar head of blue hair is missing. And this is because, in the little cluster of trees by the bridge just a few heartbeats earlier, Corrin saw a flash of white fabric and a scrap of blue flit into the shadows.

“I need some time,” says Corrin.

“We ought to leave now,” Xander replies, “if we want to make good time back across the border.”

“I just need five minutes.”

“They’ll be turning around with reinforcements.”

“Xander,” Camilla says, laying a firm hand on his arm, “She said she needs some time.”

He nods at Corrin, who points to the lone copse of trees. “I’ll be down there. Five minutes.”

And she runs down the hill, the long grass cool and slippery under her bare feet. The river—the same river they camped alongside, trailing it here to its mouth--babbles a senseless song as it slides beneath the footbridge.

Azura sits in the broad shadow of the largest tree, her legs tucked beneath her. With one hand she shreds a blade of grass in her fingers and in the other she grips her pendant. Corrin believes, for a second, that she sees it flash blue, bright as the cloudless sky.

She sits down facing her, crossing her legs and resting her hands on her knees. Their cover of shade swells as a cloud passes in front of the sun.

“So you’re returning to Nohr,” says Azura. She studies the grass pinched between her fingertips. Corrin nods. “Are you sure of this, Corrin?” She raises her head so their eyes meet. “Once you’ve left here, there is no going back.”

“I have to. Azura, I have to.” Even if her steps were heavy and her head bowed as she turned her back on the country she had been born to. “I… I want peace. And I think the best and easiest road is with the tools I know, and the people I know, and love.”

“I understand that. I do.”

“And you can’t leave either, can you?” Corrin grasped for Azura’s fingers. “Even though I want to ask you to come with me.”

Azura’s lips part and for a precious handful of seconds Corrin can hope she is wrong. But then Azura says, “You’re right.” She shifts closer so their knees touch. “But we’ll meet again, Corrin.”

“How can you be so certain?” Corrin is not certain of anything. All the things she once believed true are slipping away from her like water through her cupped hands.

“I know it. I am sure. It’s fate, don’t you think?”

“I want to believe you.”

“Then believe me,” Azura says, and leans forward to touch her lips against Corrin’s cheek, then tilts Corrin’s chin to kiss the other, and Corrin returns the favor. She smells of brisk soap and the fresh, cool water of the lake by the castle.

Now Corrin knows what they might have been, had she stayed. She rests her forehead on Azura’s shoulder. Azura sings, her lips brushing Corrin’s ear, gentle and worldless, soft and high and sweet. “This song is for you,” she whispers. “Remember me, and know we’ll meet again.”

Corrin grasps at the thread of the song, hums it in her tuneless, artless, off-key creak as she climbs the hill again. As she looks back at the copse where there is no more blue. As the river flows onward, and she mounts her borrowed horse and turns towards the place where she was raised, she hums it clumsily so she does not forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's an update?! What?? A big thank you to everyone who read chapter one and decided to stick around!
> 
> I gotta admit, my absolute favorite Azura thing is how much she loves food. Same, Azura. Same.


	3. After the Rain

There was a time, fresh from the fortress, when Corrin did not mind the rain, not even when she had to stand out in it.

That time is long past.

She crouches in the earthen folds near the entrance of Fort Dragonfall as chilled rainwater dribbles down her scalp and churns the ground to mud beneath her aching feet.  Her shivers clatter the joints of her armor.  A sullen, soaked Jakob guards her left, Arthur her right.  They will enter the fort from the west, Odin and Niles from the east.  Silas and the small remainder of her people lie in wait for an assault on the front gate, while somewhere in the shelter of the foothills beyond Elise waits with Effie and that strange small girl they’d found wandering about, the one who called Corrin a “callow youth” in her snide, nasal voice. 

Well, she wasn’t exactly wrong.

There was also a time, while she still lived trapped in that maze of drafty, dreary halls, when she had thought war a distant tragedy, a clever game, and devoured volume after volume of military strategy with the same delight as her heaps of pulpy novels of adventure.

That time, too, is past, given way to the clench of cold fear tightening her hand as she drafts her battle plans.  She spent days planning this assault on Fort Dragonfall.  More time than she could spare and far more time than she needed, camping amongst the scorched fields of Notre Sagesse.  She wonders why they even bother, with fields so poor for harvest as southern Nohr.

The proud stone dragon’s head of the fortress surely rears above the rocky hills in the murk, though she cannot see it.  Perhaps it is one of her ancestors laid to rest. 

If so, she really ought to be apologizing.  After all, she is about to desecrate its final resting place.

The bright arrow-slits flicker briefly in sequence as a guard stalks past them.  A great clash and a cry sound in the distance—Odin laying waste to the east wall, and Corrin’s cue—and she vaults over her shelter and races for the fortress, her guards at her heels.

They make a dramatic enough entrance, that is for certain, one swing of Corrin’s spiked tail crumpling open a vulnerable stone corner like so much stiff paper.  In the precious seconds she takes to return to human form Arthur secures the hallway, Jakob following with a throwing knife braced for use.

As far as they can see the short hall is empty, the only sound their slow footsteps and the whisper of Corrin’s blade from its sheath as they pass between rows of guttering torches.  Until down the far corner  there is the clash of steel and the jarring chorus of battle, grunts and gasps and half-strangled cries—one of them a woman’s.  A voice that is familiar to her.  She is lurching forward before Jakob can reach out a hand to stop her, barreling ahead and whirling about the corner at full speed.

To where Azura is locked in combat with two Hoshidan soldiers, the tip of her spear whirling like a bright ribbon, her long hair catching about her arms as she swings.  She is quick and she is lethal—years of training have seen to that—but she is also wearing nothing but a slip of a white dress, and the two Hoshidan soldiers she faces are armed and armored.

Corrin makes a startled, strangled sound of surprise, and thank goodness her body knows what it ought to be doing, years of the rigors of training twisted it taut and ready to spring.  The soldier closest to her shows her his back as he circles about Azura, trying to catch her flank.  Corrin catches the joint between his chestpiece and shoulder as he turns, digging into the flesh beneath his arm.

And then it is over, and she yanks her blade free with cold, trembling fingers.  She does not look when Jakob’s knife finds a place in the other’s neck.

Azura stares back at them over her shoulder, her amber eyes round.  She cradles her left arm close to her stomach where it seeps a long smear of red into her thin dress.  Droplets spatter her bare feet.

Corrin sucks in a breath through gritted teeth and wrenches her cape from her shoulders, holding it forward.  “Here, I’ll make you a sling.”

“What are you doing here, Corrin?” Azura’s lower jaw quivers with pain as Corrin wraps up her arm in a shoddy sling that Elise will surely scold her for later. 

“Taking you to a healer.”  She secures it with a knot she prays will hold, and braces one hand on Azura’s good shoulder and her other arm in the small of her back.  She gestures to Arthur.  “Change of plans.  The three of us take Princess Azura back to Elise and Effie, and then join with Silas.”

Arthur nods, crestfallen, and Corrin wonders at his dismay before plunging back out into the wet and dark.  Even her keen eyes need a few blinks to adjust after the torches inside, and blotchy-off-color afterimages flicker within her eyelids as she closes them against the keen and cold sting of the heavy sheets of rain.

“Corrin, Corrin, I can walk,” Azura protests, pushing at Corrin’s arm with one shaking hand, quivering in shock or pain or both.  Corrin knows the places a wound is quickest to be fatal—that was one of the first things Xander taught her, laying the tip of his blade against all the places one aimed for to kill, throat and heart and armpit and the inner thigh—but she cannot tell if Azura’s wound is deep enough to bleed her dry before they can make it back beyond their defenses.  Corrin shifts her grip for better purchase as she hoists Azura higher, grunts as she braces one arm under her legs and the other beneath her shoulders, to lift her feet from the ground.  “I can walk,” Azura says again, even as she laces her hands over Corrin’s head.

They lurch past the gate, an awkward three-legged creature slipping on the damp leaves underfoot—it is one of the few moments in Corrin’s life when she thinks that really, maybe, she ought to have worn shoes—until the clink of armor and the scuffle of boot rises before them.  Silas and his people, about to begin their assault on the raised front gate, thank the heavens Odin and Niles made it that far without her, and the point of Silas’s bare sword aimed for the slit in her armor at her thigh.

“Your highness!” he shouts, ramming it back in its sheath.  “Why are you going the wrong way?”

“Silas, this is Princess Azura of… of Nohr, I suppose...  I’ll have to reintroduce you under better circumstances.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” slurs Azura with a dip that sends her digging her fingers into Corrin’s arm.  For his part, Silas is pale as porridge, but he moves aside to let Corrin shuffle the rest of the way to Elise’s little tent beneath a gnarled copse of trees.

Not that she needs have bothered, for Elise has come to meet them anyway, neatly sidestepping Effie.  “Let me through, let me through, there’s wounded!”  Elise squares her stance, bracing her hand and little healer’s staff against her hip, her eyes flicking over Azura’s wound.  In this, her chosen vocation, if nothing else, Elise is only narrow-eyed, tight-lipped efficiency.  “I’ll take her.  Corrin, go back to fighting,” she orders without a backward glance as she and Effie take Azura’s weight.

Corrin squeezes Azura’s hand as she lets it go, and then her grip tightens on her sword-hilt instead, and she stands with Silas as they burst through the raised iron gate and finish what they came for.

 

She is not sure if she sleeps afterward, or just lies half-awake in torpid dreams, but either way she rises plastered in sweat with her bedclothes wrapped about her waist.

She bathes in cold water and rubs the gooseflesh on her arms as she paces about camp.  Elise stands sentry outside the medical tent, one hand braced on a hip, the other twirling a staff.  “You can go in,” she says, imperiously—Elise takes her duties as squadron medic so seriously Leo would be proud—but she smiles.  Corrin heard Elise’s voice, raised and breathless with excitement, whenever she wandered by the tent, and has gathered that Elise knows exactly who Azura is. 

“I’ve closed her wound and she’s in fighting shape.  Not that you should have her fight though, probably.  She’s a string bean, like me.”

“Thank you, Elise,” says Corrin.  She raises a hand to pat Elise’s head, like she once did when they were girls playing in the castle courtyard, but at the last second pats her on the shoulder instead.  Like comrades.  After all, Elise is now responsible for saving her own skin more than once.

“Just doing my job,” Elise replies with a wink, and skips off toward the laundry to wash the rusty dried blood from her gloves.

Azura stirs to a sitting position as Corrin pulls the tent flap aside.  Elise has dug out one of Corrin’s spare nightgowns, a gauzy castoff of Camilla’s with lace at the collar and cuffs.  Camilla was the one who packed her clothing, in fact, insisting that a princess needed her comforts even on the march.  It suits Azura far better than it ever suited her. 

“Good morning,” says Azura, blinking her round eyes.  Her damp blue hair has puffed up about her face.  “Thank you again for saving my life.  Corrin.”

“How’s your arm?”

Azura turns her forearm so Corrin can see the scar--neat and small, only a thin pale pucker.  Elise was as skillful with her staves as a fine seamstress.  “It hardly hurts at all anymore.”

“What are you doing all the way out here?  How did you come to be in this place?  And, um, you’re welcome.  I’m very glad you’re alive.”

Azura crosses her arms, wraps her hands about her forearms, her eyes fixed on a point in the distance beyond Corrin’s head.  “My captors were Hoshidan dissidents.  They thought me a spy, sent to whisper lies in King Ryoma’s ear.  He tried to protect me, of course, but it still came to this in the end.  As I always knew it would, the day our countries came to war.”  She speaks serenely, her chin held high.  “What did you do with them?”

“The living are on the march back to their own forces with healing supplies.  They... they asked to take their fallen with them.”  Hoshidans burnt rather than buried their dead, as she learned in her brief time there, and spread the ash about their family's land.  She wonders where their ash might blow on the hot wind, over their ripe fields beneath a cloudless sky, and whose hands might scatter them.

“Good,” says Azura absently.  “I doubt they will trouble with me any longer.  But their countrymen will, especially now that I’ve been rescued by their traitor princess.”

Corrin’s heartbeat stumbles.  “Azura, I’m sorry.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t mean to—“

“Peace,” Azura says, patting the back of Corrin’s hand.  “Don’t apologize.  I owe my life to you.  And you cut a very dashing figure, may I add.  It was the stuff of ballads.  Perhaps I’ll write one for you, and sing it.”  Azura’s lips pinch into a fond smirk.  “Corrin of Nohr, dashing rescuer of maidens from towers.”

“I ask only that you don’t sing it anywhere in my hearing, please,” says Corrin, who is sure her cheeks are pink and round as grapefruits.  “Where will you go now?  I could send you with an honor guard back to Hoshido, if… if that is your wish.”  It was her wish before, she thinks, surely it is her wish again.

“I… I do not know, now.  Perhaps I am fated to wander without a country.”

“Wandering isn’t necessary,” says Corrin.  “Although you can, of course, if such is your preference.  You could compose ballads in your own honor.  Lady Azura, mysterious maiden of the mists.”

Azura hides her smile behind her hand.  “Perhaps I could bestow vaguely worded prophecies and disappear in a dramatic flash.”

“Lady Azura, slayer of dragons,” said Corrin, her pink cheeks hot.  “What I mean is, join my people. Come back to Windmire with me.  You’ll be welcome.”

“Will I?”  Azura blinks.  She taps a finger against the back of Corrin’s hand.  “I doubt the King will be so eager to see me return to his fold, not when he has given you such a rousing welcome.”

“But you’re his daughter.  He’s always claimed all his natural children.” 

“Perhaps,” Azura says softly, looking down at her lap, “not for the better.”

Azura must remember, Corrin realizes with a twitch of shame.  Azura would remember when their number had been far greater than four plus one.  Camilla left fresh flowers on the graves of her two full-blooded siblings.   Every summer Xander poured a glass of wine on the ground for the sister, who had once been first princess.  Perhaps Azura had loved them too, once.

“We won’t stay in Windmire long,” she blurts.  “We never do.  I’m sure we’ll be sent off to my next harrowing within the week.  You could stay with us.  Fight with us.”  Should Elise ever see Azura in battle, she would surely take back her advice.

“I see."  Azura's gaze dips.  "I… thought of you, often, Corrin.”

“So did I.”  Corrin’s throat is suddenly dry.

Azura grips the pendant strung around her neck with a white-knuckled fist.  “My song is yours.  Let us see what we may make together.  Or unmake, if our king’s senseless war can yet be unmade.”

They break camp as a fresh burst of rain washes over the hillsides.  It is a long trek through dripping forest and along mud-churned road back to the capital, to bring news of a useless provincial fort barely more than a hunk of worn brick.

 

* * *

 

 

Corrin sits on the top step of the stairwell to the guest quarters, her arms around her knees and sore and swollen feet digging into the thick carpet.  Swells and strains of music drift upward from the banquet still finishing downstairs. 

Someone has started playing the piano, a quick and nimble tune that she might have been able to follow once.  Back when she and Leo used to practice together, shoving back and forth for best purchase on the bench and crossing one another’s arms to reach the keys on the other side.  She hasn’t touched a piano in years.  Her right hand taps restlessly against her leg, trying to keep pace with the skip of the music.  No good.  Leo could play circles around her now.

She straightens with a start when she sees someone mount the stairs.  She knows that long, swaying stride, that veil of hair.  She should relax.  Her back is straight and firm as a steel rod.

“What are you doing sitting on the stairs, Corrin?”  For her part, Azura does not sit, only waits with her toes curling over the edge of Corrin’s stair-step, leaning on one hip.

“I was listening to the music,” she murmurs.  Someone has started up the lively warble of an estampie and the stomp of heavy feet nearly drowns the song.  “Are you off to bed now, then?” 

Azura retires early, or so she has learned on their journey back to the capital, when Azura pitched her tent, as ever, on the very outskirts of camp, and ducked inside before the sun had even set, long before Corrin still lay awake sweat-damp and jittery, eyes wide in the full dark.  She did not move it closer, despite a few nudges on Corrin’s part she liked to think of as subtle.  And they made conversation on the road, but only shallow snips and snatches, and in the company of one of her retainers or, more often, Elise.

It was enough to make Corrin wonder if she had misjudged what they might be to one another, those long months ago.  And enough to become quite flustered about it, and then quite embarrassed even further over her own fluster.

Azura presses her fingertips into one temple.  “Yes.  I am exhausted of people.”  And she looks it, too, the smudges under her eyes darker than ever.  Corrin can sympathize.  Their one meeting with her father—Azura’s father—the King had left her wan and drained for a day afterward, and Azura cloistered in her guest room, outside which Corrin raised her hand to knock half a dozen times before losing her nerve.

“And you?  As I was leaving Camilla asked me to find you.  She insisted you owed her a dance,” Azura says with a peek of a grin.  She has taken to Camilla, just as Camilla has taken to her.  As if that was ever in doubt

Corrin left early, in the middle of a lively dance when Camilla swung Elise about in huge circles, the both of them breathless with giggles, mostly so Camilla couldn’t corner her on her way out and convince her to stay.  Leo was in the corner by the piano, of course, gracefully sulking.  Xander was not in attendance.  Xander was never in attendance when there was paperwork to be doing, which was most always.

And there was Azura, flitting gracefully about at the edges of her birth-sister’s shadows.  Camilla prevailed on her to join them, just once, when the players began a gentle and stately circle dance, and she twirled about light as a windblown seed, her borrowed dress flaring up around about her ankles.

Corrin was not overfond of dancing.  But watching the curve and twist of Azura’s hip as she turned about Camilla, their arms brushing together as they lifted them high above their heads, she found she wanted to take Camilla’s place.  She wanted to dance alongside her with a fierceness that made her throat ache.

And instead she had turned and fled to the stairwell, in the hopes of catching her on her way to the guest rooms.  Truly an excellent use of her abilities as a strategist.

Half the truth is the best lie, supposedly. “I don’t know how to dance.  Or, I can, but I’m not very good at it.”

“Please.  I’m sure you’re not giving yourself fair due.  I’ve seen you spar, Corrin.”

“Everyone says that,” Corrin grouses, crossing her arms, “but it’s such a lie.”  Camilla, too, had insisted that battle and dance were two sides of the same coin, even as she watched Corrin fumble and trip through her lessons with her childhood instructor, a hard-faced former dance troupe manager of Cyrkensia who kept time by pounding a walking stick into the floor like he was trying to pulp fruit for jam.  The advice had not been helpful.  “You’ll take it back as soon as you’ve seen me.”

“All right.”

“Sorry?”

“Show me your dancing, so I can take it back.”  That rare smile again, like a bright bird flitting between branches.

Corrin pushes herself to her feet.  “All right.  Not here.  In… in my room, I suppose?”  Azura nods her assent, her golden eyes betraying no trace of the nerves that have reappeared to plague Corrin’s stiff hands as she grasps the heavy handle of the door to her rooms.

It is a place she has only slept in a few scant times, and there is nothing of herself in it—only heavy, ornately carved furniture and a wide canopy that she often tears down when she thrashes in her shallow sleep.  Felicia has kindly left a lantern burning beside the bed, so Corrin may read herself to sleep, and it casts a large enough circle of light for their purposes when moved to the sitting-table.

The furniture will get in the way.  Corrin pushes aside the little tea table and the pair of cushioned chairs.  The desk gets shoved into a corner, its huge and heavy chair tipped on its side. 

Azura does her part by rolling up the thick carpet.  She sneezes as motes of dust swirl in the air.  “Dancing on carpet,” she says as she lowers herself on the edge of Corrin’s bed, crossing one leg over the other, “is a nightmare.”

Corrin slides her slippers off her feet and sends them skittering towards a wall with a kick.  By instinct, she finds herself stretching, as she would before battle, working out the tightness in her neck and shoulders.  She enters the first few steps of Heidel’s second form, her fingers tight around the hilt of a would-be sword, spinning on the ball of one foot while flicking her imaginary blade left and right.

“Corrin, you do realize that’s fighting?”  The dim candlelight gleams in Azura’s laughing eyes.

“Excuse me.  You’re the one who claimed dance and battle were the same.”  At her next turn her toes catch on the edge of the roll of carpet.  “What shall I dance for you, then?”

Azura’s eyebrows raise.  “Do you know the waltz?”

“Yes,” Corrin says hesitantly, kicking the carpet further out of the way.  That one hadn’t been learned from her official instructor—“that godless peasant fling,” he had branded it—but with the other youths secreted away in the stables, whirling about until they collapsed panting in piles of hay.  Flora had shown surprising skill with it.  “I was never any good at that, either.”

“Let’s see.” Azura rises and offers her hands.  Corrin grasps them, notes with some surprise at the fresh and rough calluses.  She remembers Azura’s hands being soft and smooth, only a few short months ago.  “I’ll lead first, so you can get back into the rhythm of it.”

“Are we going to dance without music?”

“Am I a songstress?” she replies, and begins to a wordless tune.  It is familiar somehow.  Perhaps it is one of the songs the head stableman used to play on his fiddle when he was pretending not to notice the children using his workplace as a dance hall.

Somehow she steps return to her as well, and she stumbles through memories of those hazy autumn days, their joined hands held at chest level between them, their bare feet soundless on the smooth marble floor.  Corrin watches her toes, barely catches herself before she stomps on Azura’s foot.  Azura glides smoothly away.  

“I’m sorry I’m so clumsy at this,” she mumbles, coming to an abrupt stop.

“No, no, you were doing well.  Here.  Let’s try it like this.”  Azura grasps Corrin’s left hand and slips it about her waist, then places her own hand on Corrin’s shoulder.  The dance flows more smoothly afterwards, even if the feeling of the curve of Azura’s hip flex beneath her fingers is far more likely to make Corrin trip.

“See?” Azura says as Corrin lifts an arm so she can spin, the ruffle at the hem of her skirt flaring.  “You can dance perfectly well.”

“If you say so.  You’re the expert.”  They twirl again, passing in and out of the candle’s small, soft circle of light.  Corrin swallows past her nerves.  “Azura, I want you to know.  I’m very glad you’re here.  Well, I mean, that is—I’m not glad of how we found you, but.  I thought of you.  I missed you.”

“You already know I felt the same.”

“I know you value your time spent alone, but I want you to know if you ever wish to talk, you can come to me.  We’re friends.  Aren’t we?”

Azura lifts the hand she was resting on Corrin’s shoulder, just a bit higher, so her fingertips alight on Corrin’s next, right above the soft skin where her pulse beats its own frantic dance.  “Are we?” she asks, her eyes round and bright.

It was not the way of friendship, thinks Corrin, to wish her friend might brush against her neck again, preferably while she wears skin instead of scales.  Not the way of friendship to do such a thing, either.

I was not wrong, she thinks, a soft spreading warmth beneath her breastbone where her heart pounds so recklessly, as if a candle has been lit there, too.  Their faces are a handsbreath apart.  She can feel Azura’s soft exhalations on her lips.  Such a short distance to close, a short distance for their mouths to touch one another’s.

She does it with ease after all.

I was not wrong, she thinks, seeing Azura’s face as she draws back.  There is something of surprise—more than something, her lips parted, her irises showing white all about the rims—and maybe even something of delight. 

She returns the gesture, tracing the tip of Corrin’s pointed ear with her fingertip, her lips lingering on Corrin’s with her head tilted to the side.  Corrin has played at kissing before—with the young stablehands in her fortress, with the handmaids-in-training who sometimes passed in and out.  Some were drab, some were a fun enough pastime, and a few still were very pleasant indeed.

This is definitely the very pleasant sort.  The warmth in her chest flares and spreads down to the tips of her fingers where she brushes the edge of Azura's jaw.

“Well,” says Corrin weakly, “I think that answers that question.”  Azura giggles, her laughter bubbling against Corrin’s cheek as she kisses her once more.

They trade back and forth, lips against lips and fingertips and throats and where neck meets shoulder, until Corrin must call truce and move to the edge of her bed, as she must rest her aching feet and pant for air.  Azura has the relentless lungs of a trained singer, after all, and she still has breath to laugh as she sits beside Corrin, resting her head on Corrin’s shoulder.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A wild update appeared!!
> 
> I promised y'all smoochin' in the tags and I am nothing if not an honest trashbag... Here's hoping it was the good kind!


	4. Grey Waves Rising

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's me, foxsgloves, your friendly neighborhood author who's never on time with updates! We're in the game proper now so that means exciting stuff and messing around with canon! I hope y'all enjoy!

Corrin cannot avoid bouncing on her heels just a bit as she and Azura stroll the streets of Cyrkensia, and earns a fond pinch on the arm for it.  She grew up fed on a steady diet of stories and songs devoted to this city and this kingdom, such a haven for artists that one can’t walk out the door without tripping over a poet or painter.  Her daydreams had often featured wandering the garlanded streets and sitting in one of the little bobbing boats at the Theatre Amusia and even, perhaps, listening to some of her poems being featured in the grand salons.

She had, thankfully, come to her senses about the latter, but she cannot contain her excitement over the rest finally coming to pass. 

Even if guilt bobs and rolls in her stomach when she thinks on the ruin of Cheve—their walls splintered and splattered with mud and blood, their banners soiled and torn.  Nestra is its opposite in every way—a harbor bristling with the masts of ships, markets draped in bright banners displaying silk and spice, crowds of fed and dressed commonfolk going about their business.  Huge, prosperous, and so safe they do not even bother with a wall.

Perhaps, when they have won their peace, all the world could look like this.

According to Leo, every year to the day since his youth, Garon descends on the city with all his retainers in tow to see the latest Torrani opera and clear out the grand, stuffy old manor on the hillside out of town that he always rents for his use. 

It is here that she is summoned to await the King’s orders and his praise for her work at Cheve, and where she is dismissed in short order when she attempts to protest with threats of retribution barely kept in check.

Perhaps next time she simply ought to hold her breath until she grows blue in the face and collapses, for all the good her words do.

The house makes Corrin restless.  Its stone halls are narrow and undressed, its rooms chill and drafty despite the work of the hardy Nestran sun out of doors.  She paces up and down its length as if she might wear a track in the old carpet, and earns glares with as much annoyance as fondness when she passes the room Xander has commandeered as his study.

At least she finds something of note in her wandering—searching for the library, she uncovers only a disappointing, dust-clotted nook with a handful of novels she has already read, some more than once, crowded onto a narrow shelf.  But on the wall nearby sits a painting as large as a window draped in a white sheet.  She removes it and ends up tangled in musty cloth, coughing as dust tickles the inside of her nose.

The painting features a tall, slim woman standing before a red curtain, with golden eyes narrowed in a knowing little smile and blue hair cut fashionably short and dressed with a string of black pearls and a glossy feather.  Garon’s second queen, then, an opera star who supposedly enchanted him with song, though her name escapes Corrin at the moment.  Leo remembers her fondly.

Azura’s mother.  The resemblance of hair and figure is obvious, but she shares the line of Azura’s soft chin, too, and her small ears.  Corrin sneaks glances at the portrait as she shuffles through the bookshelves for something she has not read before.

“Corrin, there you are, I’ve been looking everywhere for you—“ Azura trails off as her gaze falls on the painting, illuminated by the slant of afternoon daylight and the flicker of Corrin’s lantern. 

“It’s your mother,” Corrin says, shutting her book and tucking it beneath an arm.  “Yes?”

“Yes,” Azura replies, her eyes round and her mouth drawn down as she looks upon her mother’s likeness.  One hand clutches at the fabric of her skirt, the other draws around her pendant.

Arete, that was her name.  “She was from here, in Cyrkensia, right?”

Azura blinks, letting her necklace spring free.  “We lived here when I was very young, before they were married.  Everyone called her the crown jewel of the stage.  It became a very apt joke.”

“Do you remember the city at all?”

“Very little.  Garon spirited my mother away to Windmire for most of the year.  Aside from these days of spring, when they would return to see the theater where they met, and stayed in this very house.”  She sighs, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, which only comes loose to swing in front of her eyes once more.  “I never saw much of the city at all.  I would like to.  Corrin, let’s go outside for a while.”

Corrin needs no further prompting.

She is delighted to find that the stories exaggerated, of course, but not by much.  There really is a bright-robed songstress or a painter with fingers stained by oils perched on every corner, peddling their wares. 

“Oh, sit for one, won’t you?”  Corrin tugs Azura’s arm to steer her back towards a young man with a box of pastels and a smear of red on his cheek.  “There are no pictures of you at all, anywhere.  You need one.”

“No, I do not,” says Azura, her cheeks dusted with pink.  “And you don’t have any paintings in the halls of Krakenburg either.”

“Well, we’ll sit together then.”  Corrin claps her hands together.

“But we only have a few hours before we have to get to the performance—“

“The theater’s right there,” Corrin insists, pointing to where the stained-glass dome of the Theatre Amusia peeks above red-tiled roofs, “and I’m sure this young man could have it done in half the time.”

“I could,” the painter supplies.  “No trouble at all for such lovely ladies.”

Corrin slips her hand into Azura’s and squeezes.  “Please?”

Azura returns the gesture, relaxing into Corrin’s touch.  “All right.”

An hour into the process, Corrin is starting to regret her decisions.  Even in the late afternoon the hateful southern sun is merciless, and there is little breeze in the Lamp District’s narrow streets.

“It’s hot,” she complains, collapsing into Azura’s shoulders while the painter takes a moment to replenish his palette.

“You’re the one who wanted do this,” Azura reproaches fondly, squeezing Corrin’s shoulder.

Just when Corrin’s eyelids grow heavy with sleepiness, she hears a screech of “Big sister, big sister!” and Elise bounces around the painter, dragging Camilla along by the hand.

Camilla’s long violet hair is a bit damp.  “Enjoying the baths?”  Corrin asks, fanning herself with a hand.  “It’s Camilla’s mission in life to visit the baths in every city on the continent,” she says to Azura.

“She always did like to bathe until she got pruny,” Azura says, earning a chuckle from Camilla. 

“I thought I would presume on Elise this time, and perhaps give the two of you… a bit of time to yourselves,” Camilla says with a grin.  Azura meets her gaze with a level stare, but Corrin ducks her chin with a blush.  It would have been hopeless to assume they could keep anything a secret with Camilla about.  Camilla knows everything, somehow.

“Look, your picture is done,” says Elise, crouching to look at it.  “It looks just like you!  I love it!  Oh, I know, let’s all get one done together!  All of us sisters!”

“That’s a lovely idea, Elise,” says Camilla.

Corrin turns to Azura.  “Well?  What do you say to a second one?”

“Don’t worry about me, think about yourself.  I think you’re starting to sunburn.”

After determining they do, in fact, have just enough time for the increasingly-wearied young artist to do a second, and they have all rejected Elise’s idea of the three of them sitting in line on a ledge with her spread across all their laps, they end up with a serviceable portrait of the four of them in front of one of the little shops nearby.  Corrin resists the pinch of guilt as she dropped a handful of coin into the man’s outstretched hand, when her band’s coffers are already so low.  She will have to make up the difference somehow.  Perhaps sell some of her books before they move on.

A disgruntled Jakob, tossing his braid to and fro, is pressed upon to carry the portraits back to the royal manor—first by Elise, and then by Corrin when it becomes clear help is necessary.  The rest weave their way through the crowded streets—with cooler night air and the lighting of the lanterns has come an even greater spill of people, their noise crashing against the high walls of the Theatre Amusia like a rising tide.

Corrin slips her hand into Azura’s as they pass beneath the shadow of the glass dome.  Azura grants her a brief smile which slips from her face just as quickly as she lifts her chin to look at the gleaming roof.

The King’s Box is in the high balconies, much to Corrin’s disappointment.  She had hoped for a seat in one of the little boats bobbing in the shallow lake on the main level.  She had also hoped to slip in without notice from either her father or his men, and she gets half her wish.  Garon could not be less concerned, his gaze fixed on the dark and empty stage.  He ought to be sweltering, draped as he is in all his fur-lined regalia, but there is not even a bead of sweat on his pale brow.

She is not so lucky to escape the notice of Iago, who has actually made something of an effort for the occasion, in a new silver half-mask.  Say what she will of the man, he truly does have a sense for the dramatic.

“Why, Princess, we missed you at luncheon today,” he says, taking her elbow.  “Did you go down into the city without any guards?”

Corrin fishes for sympathy from Azura with a sideways roll of her eyes.  “I was accompanied by Azura, and Jakob as well.  Thank you for your concern.”

He clicks his tongue.  “Two princesses about in the streets, with only one guard between them?  You worry your royal father so, skulking about in secret.”  King Garon does not appear concerned, or even paying the least bit attention.  He merely shifts, restless, in his seat as the orchestra begins to tune and Iago hands Corrin off to her seat (between Azura and Elise, the gods be thanked).

As the lights dim, Azura leans forward in her seat, gripping her knees, her neck taut.  “Excuse me,” she says.  “I think I have taken ill.  I must go downstairs for a moment.”  Garon waves her off, his gaze unwavering from the red curtain.

“I’ll go with you,” Corrin says, making to rise with her, but she grasps Corrin’s shoulder.

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.  Please stay.  You’ve been looking forward to the performance so much, after all.”

“Hurry back.”  Corrin squeezes her hand with a quick glance over her shoulder at her father.

She does not hurry back at all, and Corrin fidgets in her seat, fanning herself with a program and trying to keep pace with Elise’s spirited chatter about operas past.  It is a busy, public place to be sure, with their guards all about, but a quick walk about the hall should have been thrice over by now.

“I’ll be back,” she says with a pat to Elise’s hand.  “I’m going to look for her.”

“Go quickly, sister, or you’re going to miss it!”

Azura is not lingering in the entrance hall, where courtiers in shining silks sipped from tall flutes of champagne and lounged on plush benches.  She is not in the little gardens that flanked the theater, still and silent and choked with dark ivy.  She is not about the halls or stair that led to the balconies or lower boxes, though Corrin risks making an embarrassment of herself jogging up and down the corridors whilst chewing her lip.

So that leaves backstage.  Corrin manages to stride through several open doors leading to the costume room, the orchestral preparatory, and props before someone thinks to stop her way.  “Hey!  I mean, er, excuse me, milady, but you can’t be back here.”  A small young woman in a dancer’s costume, rosy hair peeking from beneath her lace veil, frowns up at Corrin with her hands clasped to her chest. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to barge in, it’s just that I’m looking for a friend of mine—“

“You must hurry back to your seat, milady, the show’s about to start…”

Light and laughter spill from the next room over, among them a familiar giggle.  “Excuse me,” says Corrin, in what she hopes is her firmest voice, and strides inside.

Azura sits, not ill in the least, on a low stool while another girl in a choir costume laces up the back of her dress—a skirt like a spill of ink-dark violet, bangles of gold clinking about her wrists and ankles.  A dark veil hides her bound-back hair, and it swishes about her as she turns to face Corrin, amber eyes round.

“S-Sorry, Lady Azura, I couldn’t stop her from—“

“Azura,” Corrin whispers, crouching so their chins were at even height, “why didn’t you tell me you were going to perform?”

“It’s quite all right, Layla,” Azura assures the trembling girl.  “Corrin, this is Miss Layla, a very talented singer.  Layla, my… friend, Princess Corrin.”

Layla makes a strangled squeak of surprise, her clasped hands leaping up under her chin.

“Pleased to meet you,” says Corrin, turning to make a half-dip of a curtsy from her crouch, before whirling back on Azura.  “So when were you going to tell me about this?” 

“Corrin, I’m sorry, there’s no time.”  Azura reaches up to cup Corrin’s chin in her hand.  “Do you want to see the show?”

Corrin’s eyelids flutter.  “Yes.”

Azura leans up for a brief kiss.  “Then please go back and take your seat, because it’s about to begin.”

“Very well,” says Corrin, pressing Azura’s hand beneath her own, against her smiling cheek.  “Break a limb, yes?  That’s what the theater folk say for luck.”

“It’s break a leg, my lady,” murmurs poor Miss Layla, whose health Corrin is beginning to worry for.

She races back to her seat, her steps light with excitement, and practically shivers in her seat for the entirety of the first act, her ears untouched by the sonata and serenade.  It’s the end-of-act aria she awaits, surely.

She leans to the edge of her seat as the strings tremble, drums tumble, and Azura, garbed in her sheer dark clothes, takes the stage.  It is a good disguise.  Corrin would like to believe she knows her by her light measured step and the set of her shoulders as she awaits her cue, but perhaps, had she not seen earlier, even she might have been deceived.

“That’s not Layla,” mutters one of the noblemen in the next box below.

The music begins in earnest, and Azura dances.

Corrin has never before seen Azura dance like this, not in her turns about the ballroom with Camilla or her brief entertainments about the campfire at night.  Not even when the two of them dance alone, the thin silk of their nightgowns the only barrier between them.

This is no sweet song—her voice is quick and both harsh and lovely, the better to match the quick, lithe movements of her legs and hips.  Corrin gasps as her hands trail shining threads of water in their wake, gleaming swirls that obscure her turns and twists.  Beneath her breastbone she feels a bit of the sting of jealousy, to not have known or seen before.

With everyone’s eyes on the display onstage, as Azura twirls her arms above her head in a shining whorl of droplets, hardly anyone notices how King Garon twists in his seat, his hands clenching the arms so tightly the wood might splinter.  A groan of pain escapes his clamped teeth.

“Oh, no,” Corrin whispers.  Elise glances up at her with concern.

“It’s a spell.  The song is a spell,” Leo says, just as Azura escapes back behind the curtain.  With a gasp, Elise rushes to the king’s side, begging a medical staff off the nearest attendant.

The theater erupts in a torrent of whispers.  “It’s Queen Arete’s ghost,” says one woman, louder and firmer than the rest, “come to work her vengeance.”

She’s not far from the truth.

Corrin leaps to her feet, casting a frantic glance over her shoulder at the king’s slumped and flaccid figure.  One arm lolls over the arm of his chair.

It would be easy.  It could be now.  Just one slip of her blade, and she could think of Cheve.  Of Hans raising his bloodied axe as she puts Yato’s point to his heart and strikes.

Elise grasps her father’s hand with a strangled sob.  And Corrin’s hand strays from her hilt.  Not here, not now, utterly foolish to think she could draw the blood of a king in the midst of a crowded theater, surrounded by his attendants and his drawn and sobbing children.

“Camilla,” she says instead as she rises, “Leo.  You’ll handle escorting the king to safety, right?”

“Darling, you needn’t have asked,” says Camilla, her right hand already on her axe. 

“Never seen magic like this before,” Leo was muttering.  “Never read of such things.”

“And what will you do, little princess?” asks Iago, his visible eye narrowed to a slit. 

“I am going to go find the woman who did this,” says Corrin as she scrambles from the box about the frantic guards and medics trying to flood the king’s box.

The crowd in the halls has churned to panic, and Corrin must push and elbow her way through, mumbling her apologies as she almost slips on a fine lady’s dragging silk train.  The back passages are flooded with panicked musicians, flutes and drumsticks flailing.  A viola bow nearly finds a place in Corrin’s eye before she can lunge for the door of the singer’s rooms, which is, predictably, locked.

She whacks it soundly with her hip, twisting the brass knob.  “It’s me, Corrin, let me in, for the gods’ sake—“

She stumbles into the dressing room when someone obeys her request.  One of the girls of the ensemble, a small thing unruly-haired thing of an age with Elise, swaddled in a blue dressing-gown that she yanks tighter as she looks to Layla for further direction.

Layla’s eyes are half-lidded, her hands clasped tight beneath her chin as if in prayer.  At her side, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder is Azura, already dressed in her own clothes.

“Corrin—“ Azura says, but Corrin interrupts her.  “What was _that_?”  The too-loud sound of her own voice surprises her.  Layla and the little chorus girl shrink from her as she strides forward, only to stop short in shame.  She is angry, though, she is surprised to find, so angry her cheeks are hot and her fingers quiver.  The revelation makes her dizzy.

“Corrin.”  Azura meets her gaze with some difficulty.  Her eyes keep drifting back down her feet, only to lift once more.  “Didn’t you once say you would do anything for peace?”

“By anything, do you mean working witchcraft to assassinate the king in broad sight of half Nestra?”

“It’s a way, Corrin.  It’s a way, it’s the quickest way, and I thought it would be best.  I had to try, can’t you see, I had to—“

“Had to without telling anyone at all?” Corrin sputters.

It’s only when her head stops its spinning—or at least slows down—and she sees Layla hunkered in the corner, her knuckles pale, and the little chorus girl and her friends sitting at the dressing tables trying to pretend they can’t hear anything, that all her anger whistles out of her in a hot rush.

“Corrin, I understand you’re angry, truly I do, but please might we talk about this—“

“Later?”  Corrin swallows back the last of her ire.  “Yes.  I think we ought to.  As right now you had better run as fast you can back to the camp and fake ill, if anyone asks.”

“I’m going.”  Azura takes a dark cloak offered by one of the chorus girls and, with a last backward glance at Corrin as she yanks the hood over her eyes, disappears down a rickety set of back stairs.

“There’s a side passage that leads to the outside,” Layla says.  “It’s how we go to market.”  She takes in Corrin’s long, level stare, and says quietly, “It’s not the first time we theater folk have been involved in things like this,” she says, even though it certainly looks it.  She can’t be much older than Elise.  “And her mother is still remembered here.”

“Queen Arete’s ghost, I heard someone call her,” Corrin says.

Layla responds with the wisp of a smile.  “Good.  Let them think it a ghost, if the gods are good.”

“No ghost at all,” says a new, all-too-familiar voice.  “Only a woman, and a Hoshidan assassin at that.”

“Leo!” Corrin cries.  And with Odin and Niles in tow, too, flanking the door as their prince enters with a flick of his cloak.  “I thought you were escorting the king?”

“The king has been escorted,” he says, in clipped tones, “No thanks to the Hoshidan troops who were hiding in the crowd.  They ambushed us on our way to the exits.  The assassin was surely one of their number.”

“Surely,” says Corrin, the lie catching in her throat.  “I believe you must be right.  What of the attackers?”

“Camilla handled it.  And afterwards, despite the obvious, I was given orders, as Iago sees fit to shuffle me about like a common foot-soldier.  Track down and round up all the singers in this accursed place.  For interrogation.”

By the way the blood drains from Layla’s face and her brow crinkles, she clearly knows what that entails.  She moves to stand before the chorus girls, who reach for one another.  Corrin, in turn, shoulders her way in front of Layla, her right hand twitching near Yato’s hilt. 

“It was obviously none of them,” Leo sniffs, insulted.  “I have no intention of carrying out my orders, Miss Layla, not in Arete’s own theater.  I must only give the illusion that I have.  Do you understand?”

Despite the tears in her eyes, Layla stands straight and balls her hands in fists at her sides.  “What must we do?”

She shows Leo the passage Azura fled through.  “It’s the way to all the plumbing for the lake.  There’s another, bigger lake underground where we get the water, and some passages that lead outside.  It’s been used for… things like this, sometimes.  But I never thought we would leave like this.”  Leo swears to guard it as she seeks out her people.

 “Oh, Leo,” Corrin says, sagging with relief as the singers scatter to find their friends.  She throws her arms about his neck.  Niles chuckles as he rubs at his flushing face with the heel of his hand.  “You really are my hero, you know.”

“Don’t think I’m doing this for you,” he says, pouting.  “Think how Elise would carry on if any harm came to these girls.  Besides, doing things like this is exciting.  It’s not like I’m a hero or anything.”

“I would never.  But I am sorry I doubted you,” she says with a brief glance into the mouth of the passage as she races to gather the last of the singers.  Creeping dread seeps under her skin as she imagines Azura threading through the darkened, crowded streets, alone and friendless.  She can only hope Iago has put his trust in Leo’s hands and not in his own agents about in the city.

When the last of the chorus girls have gone through the passage—Layla holding the youngest by the hand, tearfully giving Leo her greatest thanks—Leo holds his tome in one hand so it falls open and begins to chant, his finger tracing line after line of tiny arcane script.

With a great clatter and a cloud of dust that sets Corrin to coughing the mouth of the tunnel collapses, a neat seal of rock and rubble.

“Oh, dear me,” Leo says, shutting his tome with a sharp snap.  “It seems they have all escaped.”

 

Corrin returns to camp in the small hours of the morning, shambling like a Faceless.  They’ve got drills tomorrow too before they leave Cyrkensia.  It’s going to be a horror.

Silas, on guard duty and smothering yawns himself, confirms that Azura returned safely only to retreat to her tent, complaining of some strange ailment.  She can see a lone light flickering through the blue fabric of her tent.

“Azura?  Are you awake?”  Corrin pulls back the tent flap only a few inches.  Only the patter of night insects fills the silence.  “May I come in?”

She swoops inside when she hears a soft moan.  Azura sprawls half-draped in her blankets, turning over listlessly.  Her eyes flutter open, revealing wide and black pupils.

“Corrin?  Oh, no.  Please don’t look at me.” She curls in on herself.

“Too late.” Corrin kneels at her side, brushing aside some of the sweat on her brow.  “Holy gods, you’re not faking.  You’re really ill.”

“I’m not,” Azura whispers, “really I’m not.  The worst has already passed.”

Corrin’s knees buckle and she kneels at Azura’s side.  “Do you need water?  I’ll fetch you water.”

Azura lets out a dry laugh.  “Water,” she says, “is the one thing I never need.”

Corrin wonders if it’s still there, puddling on the stage, all the water that slipped from her fingertips as she danced. 

Azura sits with a grunt, pushing her pillow into the small of her back. “Did you stay with Layla and the others?  Are they well?”

“They’ve made it to safety,” Corrin folds her hands in her lap. 

Azura’s eyes widen.  “What do you mean?”

“The king sent Leo to bring them for interrogation.  But he helped them escape through that passage you used.  They’ve gone to stay with Layla’s mother up the coast.  Iago has left his agents in the city, so they cannot return.  Not now, at any rate.”

This had been the King’s first order upon awakening, with his children and his closest advisors crowded around the foot of his bed.  Corrin had suggested that this measure was perhaps too extreme.  Even in his weakened state, he still had strength to voice his great displeasure.  Leo had been forced to come to her rescue a second time of the evening.

Azura’s eyes squeeze shut.  “I had thought… I had not thought.  I had not thought enough on what would happen if I failed.  It’s my fault this happened to them.  It’s my fault.”

The silence hangs, expectant, in the air between them.  It’s not a point Corrin can really contest.  She blurts, “Why did you keep this secret from me?  Why didn’t you tell me?  I thought we trusted each other.”  That’s too much, too close, she thinks, but there’s no way to snatch the words back now.

“It wasn’t about not trusting you.  The less people knew, the less risk.  And you’re such a terrible liar, Corrin.”  Corrin’s mouth falls open, her cheeks crimson.  “What if you let something slip?”

“Well, I don’t know.  Maybe it would have been worth it when you put yourself in danger.  When you put others in danger.  I could have helped.”

“You did help.”

“No, Leo helped.  He’s the one you ought to thank.”  Corrin’s hands twist in her skirt as Azura shifts her weight, wincing.

“It… it hurts you, doesn’t it?  When you sing magic like that.”  She should have realized sooner, Corrin realizes with a painful start, so much sooner.  Should have thought more of Azura’s drawn exhaustion whenever she lent her song in battle.  Should have pressed the issue of the bleak shadows on her face when she lent her strength to calm Corrin’s rage of the dragon. 

And she so prides herself on her eye for detail.

“It’s nothing I’m not used to,” Azura says.  Her voice is soft and calm, her face unshakably still.  Corrin could use some of that stillness.  Her hands are shaking again.

“I’m not going to ask you to use it anymore.  Not if it leaves you like this.”

“I’ve grown accustomed to it,” Azura protests.  “If this is the price I pay for our cause, do my part, then I will pay it.”

Corrin covers Azura’s limp hand with her own.  “I’m not going to ask you to hurt yourself for the cause!”

“You ask us to risk death every time we see battle.”  Azura laces their fingers together.  “Is this not the same?”

“No,” says Corrin, her voice rising, “it’s not,” though she wrestles to find a how or why that might sway Azura.  “I don’t even know what sort of spells you cast.  Do you?  Do you know whether or not they’re safe?”

“I know,” Azura says, her fingers sliding from Corrin’s grasp. 

“How do you know?”

“I can’t tell you.”  She won’t meet Corrin’s eyes.

“What do you mean, you can’t tell me?  We’re sitting right here.  You say you trust me.”  Corrin’s throat is strangely raw.  “What can’t you say?”

“I can’t,” Azura repeats.  Her golden eyes gleam.  “I can’t tell you.  I can’t tell anyone.  I can’t.”

Corrin rubs her stinging eyes with the heel of her hand.  Her head is so light, the world might start spinning circles about her.  “I have to go,” says Corrin.  “I have to go sleep.”  She won’t sleep at all.  She’ll twist about in her sheets until she’s knotted in them, damp with sweat.  “I’ll see… I’ll come back later.  Camilla will be by to see you later.  I won’t be able to stop her.”

“I can’t, Corrin.  I’m sorry.  I can’t.” And she does sound sorry, her hands wrung, her gaze low.

“As you say,” Corrin says, and lets the tent flap drop closed.


	5. White Cloud and Black Pillar

An unseasonal morning frost brings cold streaking across the countryside, the overcast sky a blank white with the constant threat of snow, the wind brisk and biting against Corrin’s bare cheeks and nose.  Sunset has not yet turned the clouds ruddy when her army stops to make camp. 

She pitches her tent.  She watches the flick of Azura’s white skirt as she moves about the armory.  She looks over the stores of dried fruit and grain and salted meat.  She listens to Camilla badger Azura into accompanying her to the mess hall.  That passes quite a bit of time.  She sands and oils Yato’s gleaming edge to protect it from the creeping damp—even swords of legend can rust, it seems.  She meets Azura’s eyes across the little green in the center of the cluster of tents.  They linger for a second, a handful of seconds, and then Azura tears her gaze away and lets Elise lead her away to the nearby thicket of berries, heavy with early new fruit that survived the frosts.

Corrin checks the ropes on her tent again.

“I don’t understand what’s going on, sweetling,” says Camilla, approaching her with a huff and a sigh.  “I hate to see you frown so.”

They have spoken in the past few days, of course.  It is unavoidable in an army camp on the march.  But never longer than a minute and never straying from topics of conversation such as mess hall cooking duty and how long until they reach the next town.  They have not even edged close to discussing the assassination attempt or Azura’s strange power.

They have not touched.  Azura has not come to Corrin’s tent in the night, and she has not gone to Azura’s.  She lies awake, bound in her tangled sheets, listening to the insects creak and chirp until her eyelids half-droop.

This night, she casts off her blankets with huff of frustration.  The anger that had so taken her has burned itself out in a quick hot rush, curdling into bitter shame.

She stalks about the ring of torchlight that makes up the edge of camp, searching for Azura’s little tent, as always, far outside the circle of light.  No lantern within, and no Azura either. 

She’s going to have to find her.  They can’t go on like this.  If Azura wishes to end things between them, then so be it, no matter if all the strings of her heart are stretched and twisted to snap.  But there must be words of some kind.   They can’t go on like this.

She inquires of Camilla’s retainers, who can usually be found alongside their mistress, the lot of them lolling in companionable silence at a fireside.  “Who, Azura?” Selena says with a toss of her pigtails.  “Went for a walk to the pond or something.  Why?  What are you, the Nohrian Inquisition?”

“Work it out, please, darling,” Camilla says at Selena’s side.  “The two of you are becoming insufferable.  I only say that with love.”

Corrin drew water from that pond that very morning, and she remembers the way easily without a lantern in the dimming end of daylight, skirting the hills and ridges that lay between. 

Azura is singing.  Softly, so softly that it won’t carry on the slight breeze all the way to camp, but enough that Corrin can catch snatches through the twisted old trees.  It’s a song she knows all too well, the song Azura sang onstage at the theater, but slow and gentle, so changed that it almost has a soft sadness to it.

Corrin sighs as she pushes through underbrush.  There, in the last light of sunset, Azura stands waist-deep in the water, her back turned, swaying gently from side to side.

Corrin sidles through the wood, calling out.  Azura pays her no mind, sliding into the water until the top of her head slips under.  Corrin picks her way onto the rocky beach, waiting for her to break the surface.  It should be now.  “Azura?” she calls.  It should have been before now.  Only a few bubbles mark the spot where Azura had stood.

With a mumbled curse—all the curses Corrin knows are mild, but it’s the thought that counts—she pushes forward into the water, Yato’s dead weight at her hip dragging against her.  She hopes with gritted teeth that she remembers something of those swimming lessons Azura gave her so long ago, on a different shore in a different land, and ducks her head underwater.

Beneath the surface everything is black, a thick, strange darkness laced with the shadows of what might have been pond-reeds.  A few bubbles burst from between Corrin’s lips as she strokes, ungainly, forward, down into the depths. 

The pond is deeper than it appeared.  Pain blooms in her ears as the water presses against them.  But then, there, she sees a flash of a pale arm, the ripple of a white skirt.  She stretches and grasps for Azura’s foot, thrashes for purchase.  Her vision grows black about the edges.  The surface is so much further away than she thought, and so strangely bright—she does not know why it suddenly glows blue as the height of the day—

She thrashes, tangling herself up in her own cape.  She’s lying on the bank, thrashing against rough pebbles, her face to the shining blue sky, speckled with puffy white cloud.  She launches upright with a start and a gasp. 

“Corrin,” says Azura, her brow creased.  She, too sits, on the bank, wringing out her skirt.  “Why have you come here?”

“I was—I was looking for you, only it was night…” Corrin stutters.  “It was nighttime.  Has it been a whole day?”

Azura gestures to the pond, which almost seems to be shrinking in the sudden dry heat.  “You have to go back.  Now, before it’s too late.”  Corrin squeezes her eyes shut and opens them to find the pond is, indeed, drying up, shrinking past the tips of her toes when it had lapped against her knees.  “The path is closing.  It’s too late.  It’s too late.”  She curls her legs beneath herself and sits like that for a moment.  “We have to go now.”

“But which way is camp?  This doesn’t look anything like…. Oh.  Oh, no.”  Azura reaches out a hand to stop her, but Corrin is already jogging towards what appears to be a nearby cliff, a strange bristly grass crumpling beneath the soles of her feet.  There are no cliffs near camp.  She had Kaze and Beruka make a survey.

It is not a cliff.  It’s worse.  Corrin runs her hands through her damp hair as she surveys, her mouth sagging open, what appears to be a sheer drop into blue sky and white cloud.  The earth simply ends.

She whirls on the opposite direction, and takes notice of, beyond the trees, vast handfuls of other huge hunks of rock, looking as if they’ve just been ripped fresh from the ground by a pack of stoneborn.  All bobbing in the blue sky as careless as wood on water.  Floating.

With her hands on her chest she sinks into the strange, stiff grass.  “I’m sorry.  I think I just need a moment.”

“I know it’s a lot to take in, but we have to keep moving.  Get up, Corrin.  Please.”  Azura’s knuckles are pale where she clutches her pendant.  Corrin struggles upright, hoping her knees don’t buckle beneath her.

“Do you know where we are?  What this place is?”

Azura considers for a moment, fingering her necklace, and then says, “Yes.”  She pauses and a brief second of relief flickers across her face.

“Then where is it?”

“A place apart from Nohr and Hoshido.  A hidden land.”

“A hidden land.” Corrin twirls Yato’s hilt as she surveys the islands in the sky.  She had thought the world held no more great shocks left in store for her, not even the bizarre and arcane.  That had clearly been a naive hope.  “Have you been here before?”

“Yes.” Azura says, shading her eyes to look at the top of the nearest hill, where something is wriggling.  It turns out to be several somethings.  A cluster of people, or things that looked like people, their skin pale and drawn, their eyes fever-bright beneath their brows, almost seeming to burn with some strange violet fire.  Corrin draws Yato with a sharp ring.

“Those who dwell here,” Azura says, her fingers twitching in search of a spear she does not carry.  “They were once human.  Not any longer.”

“I’ll go.  Stay back.” Corrin prepares to launch herself at the strangers.  There are three to her one, but their movements are awkward, jerky, like puppets whose strings have just been cut. 

“Don’t die on me, Corrin,” says Azura, dancing a few steps backward.  “Not before I can tell you the truth.”

As expected, they fall easily beneath her blade, swift and nearly silent.  They do not speak, but the cries they make as they fall are human enough.  Shivers wrack her spine as she wipes her sword clean on the grass.

Azura comes to meet her and together they crest the hill.  At its top they can see the whole of this island spread below, undulating like a crumpled sheet of metal, dotted with rotting and crumbling ruins of carved stone—a row of worn pillars like snapped matchsticks, a tiled road like a crumpled chessboard.

“Corrin, listen.  We have to get back as soon as possible.  I can get us out of here, but please listen to me when I tell you there’s only so much I can say.”

“Why?” asks Corrin.  Her stomach turns flips when she surveys the sheer drop into blue nothing at the edge of the island.

Azura wrings her hands.  “Because I’m under a curse.”

“Well,” Corrin says, weakly.  And she follows Azura across the worn old once-road.

The path grows steep, crawling up the side of a rocky hill where once it might have hewn straight and flat.  It certainly looks like it was built by human hand, for human purpose. 

“I suppose,” Corrin says, “if you’re under a curse you can’t just tell me what’s right and what’s wrong when I ask you questions?”

“Those about how I came to know this place, no.  Those about this land itself… some, perhaps.  While we are here within it.  You can only speak of this land within it, you see.  Anyone who speaks of it outside will vanish, so when we return, you must never say a word to anyone.”

Corrin grits her teeth and considers as they walk in silence.  The sun turns its bright eye directly above them, and there it remains fixed.  “Time is different here,” Azura volunteers. 

“Can you tell me when you’ve been here before?”

“Yes.  When I was a young girl, and felt lost and adrift in Hoshido, I often came here, to this place.”

It seems a far lonelier place to Corrin than any human place she has yet seen, but perhaps it might not look so to a child lost in a pale hall amongst strangers.  “Did you come here alone?”

“Sometimes,” Azura says, and again that brief flicker of relief. 

“With who?  Your mother?”

Azura studies her feet where they leave plumes of dry dust in the road.  “I can’t say.”

Corrin chews her lower lip.  “Your powers.  Are they related to this place somehow?  From here?”

Azura’s cheeks flush pink with frustration.  “I can’t tell you that, either.”

Corrin’s brows furrow.  They walk until Corrin’s calves grow sore, until they come to a place where they must climb hand and foot up a rough tumble of rock, pieces of tile strewn in the pile.  “This reminds me,” she says, “of a story I once read.”

 “Corrin, is this really the time?”

Corrin sneaks a glance at Azura over her shoulder as she steadies her grip on the rock.  “The story was about a princess of the sea, a mermaid princess, who was cursed to wander the earth.”

“I’ve—“ Corrin’s head turns at the sound of Azura’s gasp and a tumble of scree, but Azura regains purchase just as quickly.  “I’ve heard that story.  Every child in Nohr knows that story.”

“I don’t know if I remember exactly how it goes.  Perhaps you can tell me if I’m remembering it right.”

Azura’s voice is barely above a whisper.  “I’ll… I’ll do my best.”

“When the princess was cursed…” Corrin scrapes a hand over the edge of the rockfall and her fist closes on dry earth.  She hauls herself over the edge and offers Azura her hand.  They sit, Azura panting, Corrin wiping sweat from her brow.  “When the princess was cursed, she was cursed twice. The evil witch banished her from her kingdom to travel without end, but also forbid her from telling anyone of her past or the ill magic that bound her, lest she turn to sea foam.”

Azura’s huge golden eyes narrow.  “That’s mostly right.  Only the princess left of her own free will, with her small child, because the underwater kingdom had become an awful place, and they had to escape.  She had to protect her daughter, you see.”

Corrin’s heart quickens with triumph and excitement.  “I see.  Had the witch taken over, then?”

“Of a sort,” Azura says, frowning at the blue sky.

“And the princess—“ Corrin had to resist the urge to point at the pendant.  “She taught her magical powers of song and dance to her daughter, a power to enchant kings.”

“Yes.” Azura touches the tip of one finger against it.  Reflecting the blue blaze of the sky it almost seems to glow. 

“Well,” says Corrin softly, collapsing backward for a brief moment with her arms splayed amongst the strange, stiff grass.  “That certainly does explain a lot.”

Azura lets out a sigh, heavy with weariness, but with no small amount of relief.

“But if y—I mean, if the princess’s daughter learned from her mother… that means her curse…” The wan, drawn expression that draws over Azura’s face, the inward curl of her shoulders, answers Corrin’s question well enough.  Her heart plummets.  “I. I’m so sorry.”

“It happened a long time ago, this story,” Azura says, flicking her hair over one shoulder as she rises.  “We ought to keep moving.”

Corrin considers her next words as they pass beneath a shattered arch, as she faces off against another cluster of not-quite-people that leaves her quite ill-feeling.  Beyond the archway is what might have once been a sprawling orchard, still clustered with healthy trees, the ground spotted with odd, spiky green fruits the like Corrin have never seen before. 

“I’m so hungry,” Azura says with a sigh, and leans down to pluck two and holds one out, and Corrin follows her lead as she bites down through the soft skin to a tangy pink pulp beneath.  Azura devours three before they move onward.

“So why did you come here today?”

“I have to keep a promise to someone.”  Azura places a finger across her lips, raising one shoulder in the direction of a tall shadow moving between the twisted trees.  Corrin unsheaths a handspan of her blade. 

“Don’t draw, Corrin,” Azura says, hurrying forward to greet the newcomer.  Not any fever-eyed puppet at all, but a tall man with hair long gone grey and a scarred, crinkled old face—

“Gunter!”  Corrin shoves her sword back in its sheath and rushes to him.  He doesn’t recognize her face until she draws close, and all the creases in his face deepen as he breaks into a smile.  He’s grown a bit thinner here, but only a bit, his skin yet untouched by the dry wind and harsh sun in this strange place.  She holds out her hand to him, and to her surprise and chagrin he clasps and bows over it.

Azura tilts her head.  “You two… know each other?”

“Yes,” they blurt at the same time, and Corrin bounces on the balls of her feet in joyous relief, to hear his voice.  “I was one of Lady Corrin’s retainers,” he says.

Corrin adds, “Gunter watched over me when I was small.  And then not so small.  But how do you know him?  And how did you come to a place like this?  I saw you fall, you had to be—you had to have died—“

“I woke up here, in this place.  And that’s how I met Lady Azura,” he bows in Azura’s direction, and Corrin can practically hear his tired bones creak, “who taught me how to hide here.”

Azura dips her head.  “I’m so sorry, Gunter.  I had meant to come back for you right away, but I was captured and taken far from the canyon.  It’s only now that I’ve been close enough to return.”

“It’s quite all right, princess,” he replies.  “We shall all make a safe return.”

“As you say,” Azura says with a sigh.  “It’s still a long road yet.”  She throws a longing glance at the fruit they leave behind to rot in the ground.

They trudge onward, Azura intent on the broken road ahead, Gunther throwing narrow-eyed glances over his shoulder at the path behind.  Corrin walks between them, watching the clouds scud by, so close she ought to be able to brush one with her outstretched hand. 

“How long has it been for you, Gunter?”  Corrin asks.  “Since we last saw you, I mean.”

“I believe it to be a week and a half, your highness.”  His eyebrows raise.

Corrin, dismayed, plants her hands on her hips, tilting her head back to stare down the unmoving sun.  “A week!  For us it’s been months.”

“Months.”  A hint of shock creeps in beneath his martial training.

“Oh, yes.  So much has happened in the world, Gunter, and little of it good.  A week to half a year.  Is there some sort of pattern to the time difference, Azura?  Does it merely pass slower?”

After a brief pause, Azura says, “No.  Sometimes quicker, sometimes slower.  As for a pattern, I could answer if I only knew.  The way out isn’t far now.”  But the short remnants of the path lead past another cluster of the shuffling, silent sky-dwellers.

Corrin swallows her dread and pops the bones of her spine.  “Well, there’s one easy way to solve this.”  She bobs forward to touch her toes.  The transformation still comes easier if she’s limber.

Azura grasps her arm.  “No.  Not here.  You can’t.”  Her face is blanched with fear.

“If you say so,” Corrin says, wrinkling her brow.  She finishes working out the strain in her shoulders, regardless, and surveys the milling crowd of enemies.  She takes point, Gunter’s able fists making short work of the first few to try them, and after that the rest keep their distance, shambling away towards what they might think to be safety.  Corrin is happy to see them go. 

Their path is clear, but she finds Azura has led them not to a bridge or another pond but a vast, sheer, drop, down and down and down into bright blue.  “This,” Azura says, hooking her toes around the crumbling edge, “is the way out.”

“Don’t tell me,” Corrin groans, her head whirling as she creeps along the edge.  “We have to jump.”  Azura nods.  “So you have to do this every time you want to leave this place?” She swallows past the lump in her throat.  “That’s pretty amazing, you know.”

Azura smiles, her short laugh snatched away by the wind.  “Oh, not at all, really.  I always travel through water.  But you and I are the only ones who could go back that way.”

“You… and me?” Corrin places a fingertip beneath her collarbone.  “Why?”  Azura gives her a level look.  “Right, sorry.  Down it is.  Just give me a moment.”

“We need to return now, before those things attack us again.”

There is a ringing in her ears, growing louder by the second.  “I know!  Just… I’ve never jumped from a cliff before.  Not on purpose, anyway.”

“Don’t make that face.  You’re going to be all right.”

“What face?”  Corrin pouts, even as the high wind tears at her loose hair.  “You’re not even looking at me, how do you know what face I’m making?”

“That face,” Azura says, turning to survey Corrin’s pursed lips with a small smile.  “Come on.”  She offers her hand.  Corrin grasps it, laces her fingers through Azura’s without thought, second nature.  Azura, blinking, returns the squeeze. 

“All right.  Deep breath.   Okay.  Here we go—“  Azura leaps first before Corrin can finish and drags Corrin down with her, the two of them tumbling down into wide and empty space, Corrin’s legs wheeling, fast and desperate for sturdy ground, but there is nothing, just the vast waste of blue all about and Azura’s hand her only anchor—

 

She wakes on blessed, sturdy ground, and she revels in the feel of it against her hips and shoulders.  Azura bends over her, their hands still joined.  “Welcome back, Corrin.”

Corrin clasps Azura’s fingers, her relieved laughter bubbling around them.  “We made it, we made it!”  Her thumb brushes Azura’s knuckles as she sits.  “You were right, you know.  It was almost fun.  Wait, where’s Gunter?  He didn’t get lost or anything, did he?”

“He’s fine,” Azura assures.  “Time, remember?”

“Right.”  Lightning snaps and streaks across the sky above them, through the mouth of what must be the great canyon.  It is not so bottomless after all.  “While we wait for him to return… Corrin, there’s something I must ask you.  Before we met in Hoshido, when you spoke with mother, did she tell you about the throne in Castle Shirasagi?”

Corrin combs through her memories of those days, already blurry with distance.  It seems a vast gulf of time separates her from a mere handful of months ago.  “Yes, I remember.  She said something about it revealing truth?”

“Yes.  Those who sit it regain their true forms and minds.   Corrin, when the time comes… that is, when we have seen this war through to its bitter end… we must make the king take his place on it.  Promise me this.”

The bitter end, which it seems is placed in Castle Shirasagi.  “You think that is where we will find ourselves?”

Azura squints into the swift, foaming water of the canyon-floor river as if she hopes it will reveal to her another answer.  “Don’t you?”

There is another way.  A way that perhaps ends in a long fall of a parapet or a knife in the dark for the king, the the bloodshed of the border turned inward to a country split in twain, the royal family divided, Corrin an assassin, a fugitive.  Azura is right.  It won’t be the way she will choose.

“What will it do?  Do you think it will restore him to the person he once was?”  The man who had once given his children horseback rides about the palace, when Camilla and Leo were small.  Then again, that man was the same who stood aside while their mothers carried out their secret little wars with poisoned cups and knives beneath skirts.  Perhaps there is not much to change.  Corrin never knew him, after all, so she cannot say, and this is a testimony all its own.

“No,” Azura says, her brows pinched in frustration, her frown holding back all the things she looks like she would very much like to say.  “I do not think so.  Neither will it kill him.  But it… it will bring an end.”

Corrin ponders what such an end will look like.  “An end.”  As much as she has devoted herself to such a thing—an end to war, an end to the bondage of her family, an end to her own duty—most of her hopes have been worn soft and smooth from use, vague and meager as they were to begin with. 

Perhaps Xander might smile again, Camilla lay down her axe and take once more to the skies.  Leo would bask in the new and renewed attentions from his elders, though he’d so pretend to hate it.  Elise could wake every day upon a world made anew straight from her pamphlets on peace and forgiveness.  The people of the little border towns might sing as they went to a flourishing market, the roads full to choking with merchants and bards and travelers and festival-goers, on both sides of the canyon.

Perhaps she might walk where she might, and come to know both the kingdom she had been raised to and the kingdom she had been born to, not as a traitor princess, not as a mere sword hand.

Perhaps Azura might stay by her side, and they could walk together.

It is still such a long road to that hazy day, and she is so tired.  “An end.  I will do what I must to secure that end.”  Here in the canyon the sunlight is sharp and sudden as clouds break and retreat from its mouth.  “Azura, I have to ask.  Why did you not show me th—“ Azura’s eyes grow huge with panic—“that place?”  Azura sags with relief.  “You could have taken me there, and I could have known, all this time.”

Azura casts her eyes down.  “I thought it was for the best.  But it still happened anyway.  Now you’re cursed, too.”

“It’s all right.”  Corrin lets go of her hand to wrap an arm around her shoulder.  “I’d rather that than not know the truth.”  The world still has strangeness yet in store for her, it seems, and for Azura too.  But it’s a start.

Azura relaxes into her touch, leaning her head on Corrin’s shoulder, her eyes slipping closed, her breath tickling the hair at the nape of Corrin’s neck.  “It is a relief, that someone knows now.  That you know.  I wish I could tell you everything.”

Corrin leans her own head atop Azura’s.  “Maybe you can, someday.  I’m glad.  I… I missed you.” 

“I missed you, too.”  Azura slips her arm around the small of Corrin’s back and they sit for awhile, listening to the gentle warble of the little river, warmed by the passing sunlight.

Gunter makes his appearance in short order with an ungainly splash as he hauls himself from the water, spluttering.  Azura sits with a start, but Corrin does not bother.  After a long childhood minding her, she suspects there is little else that could surprise the man.

“We’ve returned,” he says, shaking water from his greaves and looking about with happy surprise. 

“We’re safe,” Corrin agrees, and rises to embrace him, and this time he allows her, and even rests a hand atop her head like he once did when she was small, and she used to pretend he was her father. 

“Let’s go back,” Azura insists.  “Before we’re missed.”

And they will be missed.  Camilla has put together a search party, Corrin is certain, not to mention the king’s suspicion.  She has that to think and worry on, to lay atop the burden of all her new secrets.  At least neither she nor Azura will have to bear them alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first rule of Valla Club is YOU DON'T TALK about Valla Club.
> 
> I think it finally hit me as I writing this chapter just how bonkers this game is haha... I took some liberties with the nature of Azura's curse here, it seems in-game that she could tell Corrin about their background but chooses not to because of Reasons. I tinkered with the curse rules to give her those reasons (and then immediately went around some of my own new rules because that’s just how I do things here in the garbage can). 
> 
> I hope y'all enjoyed, thank you for subscribing!


	6. The Dark and the Deep

Sea travel, to Corrin’s disappointment and misfortune, does not agree with her one bit.

The pirate now shares their deck assured her she would gain her sea legs soon, but every day of their journey she has shambled up to the deck to empty the contents of her stomach overboard, swaying like a drunkard as the world heaves and pitches beneath her.  She lies awake at night, her wide eyes staring, unfocused, hammock jiggling with every roll of the boat, marveling at how it’s not pulped to splinters between the crashing waves.  She’s still not convinced it won’t.

“Are you all right, Corrin?”  Elise wraps her fingers around her lantern in her lap, the light catching on the furrow in her forehead.  “You look ill.  Was I too scary for you?”

Elise’s ghost story had actually started out quite a bit frightening, to the point that Corrin sat with mouth agape, exchanging glances with Azura and Camilla, as she unwove a twisting tale of bloody haunts and immortal curses.  Only then she revealed that the ghost was merely acting in such a way because it had been deeply wronged in life, you see, and once its descendants gathered to speak to it, it departed the world in peace--

“Elise, did you take this from that book you stole from me?”  Leo, for his part, was flipping languidly through his own volume of ghost stories in his lap, attempting to search out the most blood-chilling for his own effort.

Elise puffed out her cheeks.  “No!  Okay, maybe some of it… but I didn’t like the ending, so I made it different.”

“In the original ending,” Leo said flatly, “the ghost kills them all.”

“And it was terrible!  It wasn’t scary at all.  Just sad.”  Elise poked at her eldest sister’s ankle with the toe of her boot.  Both Xander and Camilla had fallen asleep only a handful of minutes into the first story.  Xander’s eyes were still half-lidded, presumably from years of practice.  Camilla stutters awake, her eyelids fluttering.  “Your turn, ‘Milla.”

“No thank you,” says Camilla.  “Make Azura go again.”

Azura, also to Corrin’s great surprise, told an excellent spooky story, and held the lantern so the shadows danced and flickered below her eyes and mouth just right, and sent Elise burying her face in the crook of Xander’s arm with a squeal of fright more than once.

And maybe Corrin burying her own face in Azura’s mass of hair with a similar shriek.  Just once.

“I’d be glad to,” Azura says, just as Corrin scrambles for the narrow doorway.  “Are you well, Corrin?”

“I just need some air,” says Corrin, and flees to the deck, where there is plenty of air, salt-tinged and full of spray, scouring her flushed cheeks.  Against the side of the ship the sea crashes, stripes of pale foam the only things visible in the black, a huge maw of white-tipped waves closing again and again over the hull. 

“Sea travel doesn’t agree with you,” Azura says softly, padding over the deck.  Somehow, she never stumbles when the ship lurches, in her natural place upon this great heaving mass of water as she is her gentle lakes.

Corrin greatly prefers the lakes.  “Not in the least,” she admits with a choke of a laugh, gripping the rail with pale-knuckled hands for purchase.  Azura rubs her back in small circles between her shoulder-blades, but she leans forward, squinting, into the dark, watching the new pale flecks that flutter around the horizon, flickering with a dim glow.

She knows what they are—more of those soldiers from the land in the clouds, new, false life breathed into old bodies.  Tireless, they have hounded her and Azura’s steps since their return to the world of the ground.  And they will keep flying in pursuit until their sky horses’ wings grow heavy and slow and they are swallowed by the sea.  Xander keeps watch for them, muttering to himself about Hoshidan plots, shaking his head with frustration until his curls bounce, and Corrin must keep her lips pinched, lest she let something slip for their curse to catch.

One of them gave her a nasty scrape on the side during a skirmish on the march.  Thoughtlessly, her hand moves to cover it.

“I see them,” Azura murmurs, her hand moving to clasp Corrin’s shoulder, which Corrin covers with her own.

“They never stop coming,” Corrin whispers.

“They won’t.”  Azura wraps her arms over her stomach wearily.  “They never tire or hunger.  They don’t even know their own names anymore.”

Corrin draws back from the rail with a shudder.  A quick glance over both shoulders shows they are alone on deck—or close enough to count, their only company the sentries posted at aft and stern and a disgruntled Charlotte, who had drawn the short straw, in the crow’s nest, and all of them far out of earshot over the whistle of the brisk wind.  Corrin had climbed to the crow’s nest on the first night, looked down, saw the world whirl, and thought the better of it.

Azura turns away from the pale wings in the dark, drawing her robe closer against the night wind.  “Shall we go back inside?”

“I suppose.  Elise is probably bouncing in her seat, ready for another story.”

“Elise is asleep,” says Azura, her grin broadening into a genuine one, “as are the rest of our royal siblings.  Come and see.”

They creep past the pack of them all slumped next to one another.  Leo snores.  It’s a sight Corrin hasn’t laid eyes on in too long a time, and she smothers her giggle into her fist as they climb the narrow set of stairs to Corrin’s cabin, stealing about in the dark like she used to as a little girl in the drafty halls of her fortress.

The shipfolk call her cabin a room, though there’s little room to spare—only Corrin’s hammock, and two big crates in the corner full of provisions that serve as a desk.  Azura perches on the edge of one of these.  She doesn’t like the hammocks, Corrin knows, because her hair tangles in them at night.  She offers Corrin a twist of bread she was saving, and when Corrin refuses a second munches absently on the both of them.

“Azura, do you think… do you think we could—“ Corrin makes a vague, helpless gesture with her hands—“you know, break it?”

Azura pauses mid-mouthful.  “I suppose it is probably possible, though I do not know any way.” 

“If we did break it,” Corrin says, kneading her hands, “maybe you could use your powers without fear.    Maybe they would no longer hurt you.”

“Perhaps,” Azura replies, and there is no denying the light in her eyes at such a future. 

“I wish,” Corrin says, trailing off into a useless whisper only to blurt, “I wish you didn’t have to use them anymore.”

“Oh, Corrin.”  Azura comes to sit beside her on the hammock, even though she so hates hammocks.  At first they sit side by side, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, but with Azura’s slightest movement Corrin topples to the deck with an audible smack of her hip-bone.  Azura covers her mouth with her hands, but Corrin, laughing, simply tugs herself back up, and they sit facing one another with their legs crossed instead.

“I mean it, though.”  Corrin clasps one of Azura’s hands in both of her own.  “I wish you didn’t.”

Azura tucks a loose strand of Corrin’s hair behind her ear.  “I know you do, love.”

“I’d ask you not to use it any longer, but…”

“You know I’d refuse.”  Azura offers her a tepid smile.  “You’re right. “

Corrin folds her arms.  “But—“

“But nothing.  Each time I have sung that song it has been necessary.  And it will be necessary, still.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.”  Azura’s jaw droops.  “But at least I know you’ll be careful.”

“Of course.  Of course I’ll be careful.  I can promise you that.”  Azura resumes running her fingertips through Corrin’s hair. 

“And I can promise you this.  Someday, when this is all over… let’s try.”  She can feel Azura’s sigh against her lips.  “Why shouldn’t we?  We’ll have won one peace.  What’s another?  We’ll have all the time in the world.”

“You aren’t the sort to let anyone tell you something is impossible.” Azura sighs once more, dragging it out for dramatic effect.

“I have been wondering.  You said back in… that place that you and I were the only ones who could travel through water.  Presumably, that means… I have some connection to that place, just like you do.  So,” she pokes Azura’s pendant with her fingertips, “could I learn to do this too?”

Azura’s jaw works.  Discussing such things is still not natural for her, used to clinging to her secrets and truths so tightly.  Finally she says, “I believe that you could.”  She holds up a finger with her free hand.  “But.”  Corrin leans forward.  “I’ve heard you sing.  And it’s awful.”

Corrin swats at her shoulder with a giggle.  Their lips meet, once, twice, Corrin’s hands caught in the mass of hair over Azura’s neck, and then they both end up in a heap on the deck.  This time, they stay there, leaning against one of the crates. 

Corrin lets her head drop onto Azura’s shoulder.  “Do you ever think we made the wrong choice?”

“No,” replies Azura, quick as a beat.  Corrin scrunches her cheeks at her in disbelief.  “Really.  I don’t.  You chose your paths in good faith and I followed you, also in good faith.  That doesn’t mean I have no regrets,” she assures, stroking Corrin’s shoulder, “but do I think we were wrong?  No.  I don’t.”

“I wonder sometimes.”  Corrin laces her fingers together.  “I can’t stop thinking about how we’re going to have to fight them.” 

Azura is well aware, as the one who is startled awake when she thrashes about in thrall of her nightmares, and the one who soothes her back into uneasy sleep afterwards with a hand laid atop her damp brow. In her dreams she sees Shirasagi’s walls stained with soot and pitted with cannonfire, Sakura cowering behind them in Ryoma’s arms.  Hinoka falling from the sky.  In her dreams Takumi aims his bow at her heart, and she wakes when the arrow strikes.  “If I had chosen another way, maybe things would be different.”  Her hand moves, once again, to her taut and aching ribs.

“Of course they’d be different.  Maybe you’re right, and we could have lived that golden life you so dream of.  Maybe both sides would lie dead.  Maybe it would be you, instead, and you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

 Corrin blinks back the tears from her stinging eyes.  “You’re right, of course.  Like always.”

“Anyway, there’s no going back.  I believe we’ll both see that future we dreamed of, someday.  With hope, someday soon.”  Azura brushes Corrin’s hand aside where she rubs at her aching ribs.  “How’s your scar?”

“Better,” Corrin lies.

“Let me see.”  Corrin lifts up the edge of her shirt to beneath her breast, baring the long, ropy line slicing across her ribs.  Azura traces it with her fingertips and she shivers.  “It’s healing well.”

“It’s still so tight and aching.  And Elise said it should shrink, but I think it’s bigger than it was when I got it.”

“It will hurt for awhile yet.”  Azura would know.  Corrin traces the thin line beneath her collarbone with her thumb.  “Mine still aches at night, sometimes.”  She grasps at the hem of her dress, slides it up and over her hips, so Corrin can see the huge, ragged whorl that covers her stomach. 

Corrin places her palm over it, the span of her hand not quite reaching from edge to edge.  She’s seen the borders of it before, of course, but never the whole thing laid bare.  “I used to be ashamed of it,” Azura says, and the softness of her voice, they way she averts her eyes, suggests that she is still.  “I thought it so ugly.”

 Corrin presses her lips right in the center and is gratified when Azura arches her back in response.  She leaves a trail of kisses up the front of Azura’s stomach, lifts her dress higher to plant one between her breasts, and up and up to the mark below her neck, then moves for the mark on the back of her hand.

“Are you going to kiss them all?” Azura asks breathlessly, lifting Corrin’s shirt the rest of the way over her head.

“Yes,” Corrin insists, moving towards the nick on the inside of Azura’s left arm, the ones atop her knee and her instep.

But surely in the end she misses a few.  After all, partway through the night she forgets about her original intent entirely.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *insert lennyface*


	7. Steadfast as the Tide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the finale! Thank you so much to everyone reading for sticking it out to the end!

And it ends.

Takumi grows limp and then stiff in Corrin’s arms, his face smoothing into something that might have been peace.  She had hoped so greatly for some sign—that he might tell her on his last breath that it was finished, or she might see his trapped spirit leaving his body in a wisp of light or curl of smoke.

But it is done now, and she must believe that he is free, as he said he would be.  As he asked of her, in her vision splayed on the cold marble before her mother’s throne.  What a long and strange dream she had.  The back of her head aches where it must have struck, the pain pulsing in time with her rapid heartbeat.  Later, in the privacy of her own chambers, she’ll have to lift her shirt and examine the fist-sized knot of a half-healed wound beneath her left breast. 

But it’s ended.  It’s ended, and she’s wrapped in Camilla’s arms are around her in a breathless embrace, her cheek resting against Camilla’s shell of armor.  Xander clasps her shoulder, his grasp heavy.

“Something’s not right,” Corrin says.  Her ears ring and the great hall tilts and blurs when she turns her head, bile rising in her throat.  “Something’s not right.” 

Azura should be beside her, had been beside her, not a few breaths past.  She had been kneeling beside Corrin when she awoke from her slumber on the precipice of death.  She had been at Corrin’s side through the end of the fight, her song ringing in Corrin’s ears.

Her song.  The song Corrin had begged her not to sing.  The song she had insisted upon, weaving ribbons of flashing light in time with the tip of her trident as her voice seemed to swell and echo to fill the castle from ground to tower.  “We need it,” she had said.  “Don’t worry.”  And so they had.

Elise slides on her heels along the slick marble floor to the nearest hallway.  “Azura!” she calls, cupping her hands to her mouth.  “A-zu-ra!  Where have you gone?”  She’s answered by only a ringing echo, her voice hollowed beyond recognition.

“That’s odd.” Camilla squints into the darkness beyond the hall.  “Where could she have run off to?”

“She must be somewhere in the castle,” Leo suggests, brushing grime from the cloth cover of his tome.  “This was once her home, after all.  Perhaps there’s something she wanted to see or do now that she’s returned.”

“I have to… I have to…” The world tilts sideways and Corrin would fall were it not for Camilla’s steadying grasp.

“You don’t have to do anything, sweet one.  It’s over.  It’s over.”

“There’s something I’ve to do, as well.”  Camilla’s narrow-eyed gaze turns on her.  She is, after all, a dismal liar.  “Camilla, let go of me, please.”  Camilla does no such thing.  “I’ll be all right, I promise.  This was my home once too, after all.”

That gets Camilla’s attention.  Her hand drops from Corrin’s shoulder quick as if she’d touched a live flame. 

“You should be there.”  The ever-present furrow in Xander’s brow deepens.  “This is your victory, little—Corrin.  You should be the one to tell all the troops that it’s over.”

“I will.  I’ll be there.”  It is a victory, but whether it is hers and whether it was worth everything, only time will tell.  “It’ll be no time at all.  And for heaven’s sake, someone go find Hinoka.”

And with that Corrin turns on her heel and runs, breathing ragged with pain from the wound in her side.

Someone, at the news of peace, has struck up a drumbeat with enthusiastic abandon, and they’re joined by the high keen of a flute and the warble of some stringed instrument that she does not recognize.  The joyous sound chases her heels as she snatches up one of the lanterns lining the path and strikes out onto the shadow-choked grounds.

The lake is to the west.  She does not remember where the path lies and and the forest is cloaked in shadow, trees uprooted and tossed aside to make shelter during the fighting, and she aims herself towards the place where the sun slid away and plows around and over them, into the untouched wood.

She breaks into a run, metal plate on her armor heaving, until she draws far enough from the celebrations that the sweeping strings and flutes gasp and fade, leaving only the drum and her heartbeat, throbbing in time.

She cries Azura’s name, she calls ahead until her throat is raw, sweeping her lantern back and forth to leave dazzling trails in her vision, and she runs.  Branches slap her outspread hands, switch her cheeks, and catch at the joints of her ridiculous armor, which she had not thought to remove.  Her toes snag on tree roots.

She trips, goes flying, lands on her outspread hands, and the lantern shattered on the ground ahead, dragging its last breaths before it fades into cinder.

She steps on a piece of the glass as she takes off again. 

And then there is a new sound in her ears, a new song, lent aid by the frantic patter of her heartbeat.  It is Azura’s song, low and sweet and gentle, and it’s wrong.  There’s something bitter and strange about it.  It makes her shiver, itching to clap her hands over her ears.

But it gives her a thread to follow.

And then there is Azura, standing alone in the cold moonlight, submerged up to her shoulders in shining silver lakewater, singing her song.  She falters with a gasp of pain, doubling over with a splash.  Her head slips below the water. 

Corrin fords into the water and throws herself headfirst into the depths, her bare knuckles brushing against pond-reed and damp leaf, and finally the hem of Azura’s skirt, and she grasps her about the arms and drags her onto the pebbled shore until they come to rest in the reeds, her skirt and Corrin’s cape bloated with damp and tangled about their legs.

Azura gasps, not from water but in pain, one hand flying to the wet hollow between her collarbones as her ribs heave.  “You’re dying,” Corrin whispers, grasping at Azura’s wrists where gleaming patches of blue shimmer, crawling up her skin like the shadow of reaching hands.  “Oh, it’s killing you.”

Azura struggles to speak, heaves another vast breath.  “I didn’t want you to see.”

Corrin lays her down amongst the water-grass, brushing her sopping hair from her forehead.  Her pendant gleams about her neck like a dying star.  “It’s going to be all right.  It’s going to be all right.  It doesn’t end like this.  It doesn’t.”

“I’m sorry, Corrin.  I couldn’t keep my promise.”  Azura reaches up, her fingers twitching and then limp, to cup Corrin’s chin.  “We’ve done it.  A world at peace, the world we dreamed of.”

“You can,” says Corrin, “you can still.  It’s a world for you, too.  We can both have the lives we always wanted.”

“I want you to live a life of joy.  Will you do one last thing for me?”  Corrin clasps her hands over Azura’s, her chest shuddering with a sob.  “I want to see you smile for me, one last time.”

Corrin’s tears slide between their fingers, her chin trembling.  “No!  I won’t, because you’re going to live, you’re going to live, and I’m going to smile for you every day.”  She fumbles for the pendant about Azura’s neck, her fingers tangling in the chain. 

It snaps loose easily into her hand.  The glow is dim and dying, fluttering like a firefly trapped within her cupped hands. 

She closes her hand around it, and her spine spasms, doubling her over.  She bites her tongue, swallows the bitter tang of blood.  No.  She can’t transform, not now, not like this.  The pendant trembles in her hand.

She begins to sing, a pale, rickety imitation of Azura’s voice, her bloodied tongue shambling through the first verses.  Once should be enough, if it’s going to work at all.  The stone responds, its light quickening.

“Corrin, no.”  Azura grasps her fist, trying to pry her fingers open, her eyes huge and bright with desperation.  She’s caught on.  “You can’t, you can’t!”  She falls back, shuddering.  “It might kill you too!”

Corrin squeezes the pendant between her fingers as if she can force it to recognize her blood, recognize her song, turn its vengeance on her instead. 

“I didn’t fight to live in a world without you.”  Corrin chokes out the very last of the song and closes her fist on the necklace.  The gold of the setting bends, the blue stone beneath cold and smooth and familiar as her very own dragonstone, the one Azura placed in her hands on this very shore, so many days ago.  “You’re going to live.  We’re both going to live, and you’re going to sing while the little ones plays their fiddles, and we’re going to dance on the beach by the seaside and eat sticky honey pastries and go flying with our elder sisters, both of them, and look down on the world of peace that we made together.  You’ll see.”

With a wrack of pain her arm changes up to the elbow, and the pendant shatters to glittering shards between her claws.

There is a single breath of silence, and the rush of cold fear that it’s failed, she failed, it wasn’t enough, she’s going to have to watch Azura fade anyway—

And then the corners of her vision turn blackened and blue, rippling and pulsing like the tide coming in beneath a brilliant blue sky, and the pain strikes like a bolt from the sky, like Takumi’s bolt taking her beneath the left breast, and she falls.

 

She dreams. 

She floats on a vast and heaving sea of blue and gray and green, trapped in torpid visions.  There is her mother, young and vibrant, dancing on the edge of a cliff, her full sleeves billowing like banners.  There is Azura, struggling in the foaming shallows of an incoming tide, her hands clawing for the sky, her eyes huge with fear.  Her own hands, now bare human fingers, then dragon’s claws, gouging vast scars in the earth, now human again, her body twisting painfully as the change ripples through her, ceaseless and unstoppable.

Perhaps Azura was right, and she is dying after all.

She sees a great dragon with a huge, spiked head, but when it rears back and opens its jaws there is a vast and lidless golden eye between its fangs.  It roars and the earth trembles, pressure building between her ears, and though she claps her hands over her ears the sound is still there, inside her head—

She and Azura stand on the edge of a great sky island, their bare toes curling around the edge of a sheer drop into an endless precipice of blue.  “Wake up, Corrin,” Azura says, and leaps to drag them both down.

With a gasp she spasms awake, her head lolling off of Azura’s chest with a splash, and moans in pain, trying to use her hand as a shield from the merciless sunlight.  They’re still half-submerged in the shallows.  She is not certain her toes are still there until she wriggles them. 

Azura’s face is inches from her own, her tangled hair drifting around the both of them like pond-weed, her pale face tracked with tears, and more welling up in her eyes.

“That was so stupid, Corrin!” she cries, and throws her arms about Corrin’s neck, dissolving into sobs.

“We’re alive.”  Corrin lets in a sharp breath of surprise, her hands grasping around Azura’s waist.  “We’re alive!”  She lifts Azura into the air and twirls around in the shallows, reveling in the rush of blood in her ears, the cramping cold in her toes, the gleam of fresh sunlight on the spray as she spins.  Azura’s wheeze of shocked laughter.  “We’re alive, we’re alive!”

Her legs give way and they collapse with a great splash, legs tangling in the mud.  “We’re alive,” Azura repeats, in wonder.  Corrin presses her lips to Azura’s damp cheeks, her lashes still clinging with teardrops.  Azura’s hands tangle in Corrin’s mess of hair, and she rests her cheek against the hollow of Corrin’s throat, her breath catching.

“We’re alive,” says Corrin, and then, “Let’s go home.”

Azura lifts her head and wipes at Corrin’s smiling cheeks with the heel of her hand.  “Where is home now?”

“I don’t know.  Someplace you’re alive and you’re there and I’m with you.  That’s home.” 

Corrin helps her gather up the little chips of her mother’s pendant, scattered like stardust all down the beach.  She holds them in her cupped hands as they take small steps up the hill, Corrin’s arm about Azura’s shoulders. 

“I think,” Azura murmurs, “I remember you promised me honey pastries.”

They shamble up the hill, weak as ghosts.  Elise runs down the hill to greet them, her arms wheeling, shrieking in panicked excitement.  To Corrin’s surprise, Sakura dashes beside her, her mouth set in a grim line of worry. 

“Where have you two been?” Camilla screams, running after her sister with abandon, and leaving Hinoka to stand with a concerned Xander and Leo.

The days ahead will be full of long work, the work of grieving and the work of building.  The work of the living.  “We’re home,” Corrin whispers, and closes her eyes, the new sunlight painting the inside of her eyelids a brilliant red, and feels Azura’s breast rise and fall beside her own. 

And so they are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we have it! Is this ending possible? Probably not! Was I going to miss the chance to conclude this with happy alive girlfriends? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Thank you and goodnight, I hope y'all enjoyed!

**Author's Note:**

> Yo I'm archive user foxsgloves and I am actual trash for characters bonding over swimming lessons, thank you and goodnight
> 
> (and thanks so much for reading!!)


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